Can someone correct me if im wrong? What i see here is a splitting of the set of points in the sphere? However the set of points in the sphere is not really the sphere. A point has no volume so no matter how many you add together you don't get something with a volume. This seems more akin to splitting the natural numbers into odd and even numbers which are all equally large. The language that i see in this article an…
A sphere in the mathematical sense is the 2D shell on the surface of the sphere you're thinking of. So, no height, no volume.
Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
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Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
#92Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
#93Can someone correct me if im wrong? What i see here is a splitting of the set of points in the sphere? However the set of points in the sphere is not really the sphere. A point has no volume so no matter how many you add together you don't get something with a volume. This seems more akin to splitting the natural numbers into odd and even numbers which are all equally large. The language that i see in this article an…
Addition is defined as an operation with two inputs. You can't add more than two things, unless there is some particular rule that lets you.
If you have finitely many things, then this rule is the associative law: add them pairwise in whatever order, and you are guaranteed to get the same result.
To add infinitely many numbers, you need to talk about limits. Formally, when you say something like
1 - 1/2 + 1/4 - 1/8 + 1/16 - ...
you mean: look at the sum of the first two; then, look at the sum of the first three; then, look at the sum of the first four; and so on -- this sum converges to a limit, which is 2/3.
This sum is "absolutely convergent", which means you get the same result no matter how you order the summands, but some infinite sums change if you reorder things!
With points on the sphere the situation gets even worse, as there is no way to "list them in order". These sets are "uncountable", which means don't even try to sum any function defined on them.
To say approximately the same thing using technical jargon, one has countable additivity for Lebesgue measure on the reals, but uncountable additivity does not hold.
Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
#94Assume I have a sphere made of pure iron. I divide the sphere into individual iron atoms. I divide this group of atoms into two groups of atoms. I take each of those groups of atoms and form them into 2 spheres. How is it that these two new spheres are not either less dense or smaller that the original sphere?
Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
#95If I remember rightly there'a a Feynman anecdote where he points out that as the real universe is quantised this is a purely mathematical notion. I used to riff with a friend that we were "the two members of the Banach-Tarski quartet." :)
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...It often went like this: They would explain to me, "You've got an orange, OK? Now you cut the orange into a finite number of pieces, put it back together, and it's as big as the sun. True or false?"
"No holes?"
"No holes."
"Impossible! There ain't no such thing."
"Ha! We got him! Everybody gather around! It's So-and-so's theorem of immeasurable measure!"
Just when they think they've got me, I remind them, "But you said an orange! You can't cut the orange peel any thinner than the atoms."
"But we have the condition of continuity: We can keep on cutting!"
"No, you said an orange, so I assumed that you meant a real orange."
Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Exactitude doesn't exist in the universe as we understand it. Of course exactitude exists. For example, two electrons have exactly the same charge. A photon has exactly 0 charge. > There's a difference between something not being instantiated in this universe and being unscientific, though. Well, science is a particular way of studying what exists. Studying something that doesn't exist is unscientific (of course, y…
You were talking about exactitude in space, rather than charge. >Studying something that doesn't exist is unscientific What about things that could exist, might exist, or even aren't expressly forbidden from existing? These have all been used as perfectly valid reasons for scientific inquiry, historically. Asking "did some god create the universe" is unscientific by your reasoning so long as it is known that there is…
> I think it is not impossible for us to prove that the universe was created by a god, if we found some hidden message in subatomic particles or cosmic dust or something.
That's actually a good point, there could be scientific proof of some intelligent creator in principle. The fact that there is no reason a priori to believe that we will find such a proof is a problem, but I don't think it would be enough to deem the theory unscientific. Otherwise, many actually used theories would be unscientific - for example, there is no scientific reason to expect supersimmetry to exist, but that doesn't make the search for supersimmetry unscientific.
> Multiverse theory, on the other hand, would qualify as unscientific by your reasoning.
Yes, multiverse theory is unscientific by my definition. I don't believe speculation about a multiverse can be considered science in any meaningful sense. Just like simulation theory, it is using science-sounding terminology for idle speculation (though the universe being a simulation could similarly be proven by the same kind of evidence as the intelligent creator idea, to be fair).
> These are predictions that we cannot "test" except by looking at the universe and seeing what we find, and even then we are not guaranteed a positive result
But this is exactly the definition of a test. It's true that you can't prove that something doesn't exist in this way, but saying that something is untestable goes beyond that. An untestable hypothesis is one that by definition doesn't make any predictions about the universe. Multiverse theory is in this bucket - whether you believe it to be true or not, you won't expect to see anything different in the world.
> Of course if something was actually infinite, you wouldn't be able to measure it to be so, but if the model (that you have shown to be correct in other case) predicts an actual infinity and you keep counting more and more orders of magnitude, does it not make sense to assume your model is correct?
Of course it's OK to assume your model is correct, and infinity will likely be the simplest assumption in this case. However, any model that predicts an infinity can be replaced with an equivalent model that makes all the same measurable predictions but replaces the infinity with some arbitrarily large but finite number (or arbitrarily small but not infinitesimal). This second model may well be harder to work with and will contain an extra assumption (an explicit upper bound for the infinite quantity), so I wouldn't advocate for its use. But it would have to be accepted that it is not empirically distinguishable from the infinity based model.
Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is deeper than that. There is no way to do a similar duplication of a 2-dimensional disc. Why is it different in 3 dimensions? That is a property of the transformation group (rotation and translation) rather than 3-space itself.
> Why is it different in 3 dimensions? That is a property of the transformation group (rotation and translation) rather than 3-space itself. Can you be more specific? Rotations and translations also exist in 2-space. It seems difficult to argue that this difference between 2-space and 3-space is "not a property of 3-space".
Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
#98I highly recommend https://twitter.com/andrejbauer/status/1428471658088738818 and follow ups. Yes, this stuff is fishy, and yes we can blame ZFC which is a bad formalization in comparison to what we've developed since. But the real scandal is why does our definition of geometry "leak" the underlying set theory it's built atop so much? Surely it's bad to have such a leaky abstraction in pure math! The series goes on t…
> But who's going to work without AC (other than crazy HoTT people)? Yeah... Those crazy HoTT people, trying to actualize the goal of putting mathematics on an actually firm foundation and removing the rest of the gobblygook handwaved into the religion of math as opposed to the pure logic it represents... Also you can use HoTT WITH AC / law of excluded middle... It's just not there by default and there are some reall…
Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
You were talking about exactitude in space, rather than charge. >Studying something that doesn't exist is unscientific What about things that could exist, might exist, or even aren't expressly forbidden from existing? These have all been used as perfectly valid reasons for scientific inquiry, historically. Asking "did some god create the universe" is unscientific by your reasoning so long as it is known that there is…
I was talking about exactitude in general, as a requirement for a physical interpretation of the integers. > I think it is not impossible for us to prove that the universe was created by a god, if we found some hidden message in subatomic particles or cosmic dust or something. That's actually a good point, there could be scientific proof of some intelligent creator in principle. The fact that there is no reason a pri…
An infinite value is theoretically testable. It simply implies that for however long you make your ruler, the value is larger. That is a prediction. You may not reach a conclusion, as you said, in finite time, but that is still a prediction.
The problem with replacing an infinity in a model with an arbitrarily large number is that, given enough time and a long enough ruler, you'll surpass that number, meaning your model is incorrect. In defence of "science", you're adding an arbitrary number into a model that you expect to be incorrect. That's not how it should work.
If the model says there's a singularity, we don't then say "okay but well that clearly doesn't make sense, so put a limit on the formula that clamps the values to uh 10^45". That is unscientific.
Re: Banach-Tarski and the Paradox of Infinite Cloning
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Exactitude doesn't exist in the universe as we understand it. Of course exactitude exists. For example, two electrons have exactly the same charge. A photon has exactly 0 charge. > There's a difference between something not being instantiated in this universe and being unscientific, though. Well, science is a particular way of studying what exists. Studying something that doesn't exist is unscientific (of course, y…
As the other comment implied, infinity and exactitude are two sides of the same coin. Exactitude is infinite precision. No finite amount of empirical evidence can afford infinite precision, so you’re back in math-land.
Perhaps the problem here is one of mixing intuition (the idea of 'an object') with rigorous physics and mathematics, perhaps this is where I am going a bit wrong.