Replies

I'm not as up on Aristotle as I should be, but my suspicion is that his understanding of time and causality is not fully modern.

That's a fact! -- but how could it be, Physicist? Still, he got so much right. Something in his discussion of limit seems analogous to QM's "observer." I'm mulling it over. Maybe I'm mistaken about this, but it's something to think about.

Thanks for your book recommendation. I'll check it out. Also thanks for all your help to me in working through my understanding of QM. Which I'm still working on. :^)

And thanks for writing!

For Lurkers and anyone interested, I’d like to add the following reference to my post to edsheppa at 4009 with regard to links and sources which may help to explain why I say that the genetic code contains algorithms. It is the result of looking further into the link Nebullis provided to betty boop at 4100 which Doctor Stochastic followed-up at 4114.

Looking at Life with Gerard 't Hooft

Today, we are discovering that nature is very mathematical, very methodical, very logical. To me, this is a strong indication that our entire world is ruled completely by mathematical equations and predictions - and not only that, but that humans have the capability to sort it all out; they already have come a long way. It is quite conceivable to suspect that humans will figure out the ultimate equations that are at the basis of everything. Some people attribute it to our extreme arrogance that physicists can even dream of such ideas, but many others of us have this feeling, this impression, that truly fundamental equations may exist - equations that will be universally correct, needing no tampering, no further corrections of any kind, equations that describe how our world is running at the tiniest possible scales and with the most extreme accuracy.

This is, of course, very much a case of feeling and belief at the moment - we can't say anything for sure. But my feeling is that it is quite likely that nature is built extremely logically, with precisely defined laws that can be expressed simply given the right "ingredients". We haven't yet understood at all what these ingredients are, we don't know how to describe the degrees of freedom in nature at this time, or how we should formulate the mathematics. But many of us are trying, each in our own way, to see if we can make further progress, if we can improve our understanding of what is going on.

From the article linked by Nebullis at 4100:

Physicist proposes deeper layer of reality

The key, says 't Hooft, is information loss. At the smallest conceivable size scale - the Planck Scale, many trillions of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom - there exists complete information about the world.

This information gets lost very quickly, 't Hooft explains. By the time we start trying to probe and measure a system, we are like archaeologists trying to make sense of ancient Babylonia: we have only the scantiest of information to go on. We can say only what the system was probably like.