[dougd]

I think another analogy might help clarify my thinking: Shannon information theory [to have] universal application to all fields where information processing is relevant is not so different from saying "Classical dynamics theory has universal application to all fields where motion is relevant" Yes, it works for everythng people knew about bodies in motion UNTIL the problem of the speed of light was come upon [that it did not 'add' in the way velocities 'should']. It was a blindness that led to conjectures about an 'ether' and other earlier blind alleys. It took Einstein to shake off that straightjacket to realize it was just a subset of 'reality' - not the entire truth - and allowed him to conceive special relativity.

[betty boop]

It was a blindness that led to conjectures about an 'ether' and other earlier blind alleys.

The "ether" may be making a comeback. To me, it is just the 19th-century name for the universal zero-point vacuum field of 21st-century physics.

In the natural sciences, so much has changed and is changing. I think we're due for a "paradigm shift" whose seeds were planted in the first decades of the 20th-century....

I'm just fascinated by all this.

Thank you so much for writing!