Early in 1989 I found myself on a team that was responsible for automating the control and tuning of the source for a negative-ion accelerator …
Tag: logic
Epilogue
The Mind and the Body
Thought Experiments
A thought, or gedanken, experiment is the creation of a simplified, often fanciful, world for the purpose of understanding the implications of a theory. One of the first was Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which Plato postulates that people are only able to sense a part of the universe about them. The allegory explores what that means and implies. The real value of thought experiments is to generate hypotheses that can be tested in the real world.
WHAT IS (NOT ART)?
Systems of knowledge have languages associated with themselves. The language can be a natural language, mathematical language, or even artistic language. We can say that each of these closed knowledge systems has big holes in it. There are true things that the knowledge system will never know. Any system of knowledge is like a great sponge with structure, but that is full of holes. Knowledge does not expand like a bit of perfume into a room. It expands like an interconnected sponge skeleton of knowledge.
Some Modest Proposals
I am a social-media whore. I am awake after midnight fascinated by what people might say next. Now that Mr. Trump won the Presidential election, the future no longer seems to be constrained by civilized precedent. Any proposal is now taken to be credible; even the dismantling of the extremely popular Medicare is on the table.
Self-infanticide
Gödel did something very clever. He found a solution of Einstein’s field equations in which the world lines circled back on themselves. This means that if you were traveling along a world line you would eventually encounter yourself as a baby. Suppose you kill yourself as a baby. Would you still be alive? It would be disturbing if you were both alive and dead. Unlike quantum mechanics, Einstein’s theory does not address ambiguity explicitly. The great challenge of modern physics is to unite the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. This has not yet been done.