From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Tue Dec 27 2005 - 10:26:57 MST
At 06:41 PM 12/26/2005 -0500, JKC wrote:
> > Our best guesses exceed either of our graspings
> > of the physics involved, but none of them postulate a 1st cause.
>
>Then they must be random.
>
> > AFAIK they all involve a random fluctuation
>
>Ah yes, random.
No need to go back to the big bang, and maybe traditionally intractable or
even long-run-time computational topics aren't really cogent either: maybe
it's due to not being able to stuff a two-pound turkey into a one-pound bag:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27eins.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=printK
<In an essay recently in Nature, Dr. Zeilinger sought to find meaning in
the very randomness that plagued Einstein.
"The discovery that individual events are irreducibly random is probably
one of the most significant findings of the 20th century," Dr. Zeilinger wrote.
Dr. Zeilinger suggested that reality and information are, in a deep sense,
indistinguishable, a concept that Dr. Wheeler, the Princeton physicist,
called "it from bit."
In information, the basic unit is the bit, but one bit, he says, is not
enough to specify both the spin and the trajectory of a particle. So one
quality remains unknown, irreducibly random.
As a result of the finiteness of information, he explained, the universe is
fundamentally unpredictable.
"I suggest that this randomness of the individual event is the strongest
indication we have of a reality 'out there' existing independently of us,"
Dr. Zeilinger wrote in Nature. >
Damien Broderick
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