Sunday, October 20, 2013
What if we don't need (unified) theories? (Just programs.)
I'm thinking of the case where there are two theories G and Q that you want to replace by a unified theory U. (A "theory", to make the term somewhat precise, refers to a collection of expressions in a particular language, say a language whose "alphabet" consists of mathematical notations that can express field equations in physics.) The problem with G and Q is that they are inconsistent (when they are interpreted in the appropriate framework) in making predictions within a certain narrow domain. Hence the search for a U that is consistent. (Perhaps a different language is needed for U than the language[s] of G and Q.)
But suppose that instead of G and Q we have programs (written in one or more programming languages) Gᴾ and Qᴾ, and they too make inconsistent predictions in a narrow domain. (We can think of Gᴾ as simulating G, Qᴾ simulating Q.) Now we want to replace programs Gᴾ and Qᴾ with a unified program Uᴾ that is consistent. The software "art" of handling inconsistencies in simultaneously running Gᴾ and Qᴾ may involve some sort of handling of exceptions. Call this software Eᴾ. Then (simplified) Uᴾ = Gᴾ + Qᴾ + Eᴾ.
So the search for a "tidy" theory U is replaced with the coding of a (somewhat) "hacky" program Uᴾ.
Could this be an acceptable approach, or would many be left unsatisfied?
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Everything is made of code
Everything is made of particles.1
Particles are 'bundles of properties'.2
A 'bundle of properties and capabilities' is code (of an object in object-oriented programming).3
∴ Everything is made of code.
1 from the atomists of ancient Greece (Today, their 'atom' becomes our 'particle'.)
2 from an August 2013 Scientific American article (Also, Quantum Identity: lecture notes from Jonathan Bain)
3 from a computer science textbook
plus.google.com/108161427707267075271/posts/agd91xv1zC5
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Quantificational Relativity
Theory of FIN (Jan Mycielski) =
Finite Mathematics of Indefinitely Large Sets (Shaughan Lavine) =
Quantificational Relativity
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
The language of code
Mathematicians and physicists may have a "love-hate relationship" because they don't speak the same language. Fortunately, the mathematician and the physicist can meet at the computer (numerical relativity, quantum Monte Carlo, etc.) and begin to speak a common language: The language of code.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_relativity
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Monte_Carlo
haskell.org/haskellwiki/Numeric_Quest
...
(There really is no concrete language of mathematics until it's expressed in code: LaTeX/Mathematics for display, a coding language for execution.)
Argument against consilience
The sciences and the humanities are two (or multiple) codesbases, each with perhaps different coding languages. Separate to a large degree in their development and purposes, but can share code (reuse) in their interactions.
See also Against Unity by Richard Rorty
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)