De Historia Piscium

Soundtrack - Different Trains - Steve Reich

Nice day today. No black mood and no worries. Alertness Index at 8.6. Specified annoyances 0.34. Albedo 0.39.

Sorry. Just had a Bridget Jones moment there. Yes. I have read it though how did anyone think that you could compare it with Pride and Prejudice? I wanted Pride and Prejudice to win and I haven't read it yet. My wife dug a copy out for me but I am working my way through Feynman's collections and Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. No tea has actually come out of my nose yet but that is because I haven't actually drunk any tea while reading it yet. There is a point only a few pages into this book when the size of the Universe becomes all too apparent but I also found at the same point that I couldn't stop reading. Bill Bryson has a very uncanny knack of writing heavily intellectual material in a light-hearted prose style and so gets across very powerful ideas while seeming to entertain. This must always be the gift of a good teacher. Even the cynicism which he occasionally puts in, seems entirely justified. He is not afraid of pointing out toes of clay. Newton (who you would think was one step down from a god) is shown up for the cantankerous old weirdo he actually was. Exactly my sort of person. Still he does seem to have done Robert Hooke an Injustice. Now the question is would Newton have been able to understand Relativity or even accept it. Would Newton have been to Relativity what Einstein was to Quantum theory?

I thought about something related to an old rant about how much an entity creating a artifically intelligent mind would have to maintain in order to convince that mind that it existed in a Universe of the creator's own invention. I think I said that it would be relatively easy to maintain this Universe as you would only need to maintain a sphere of influence around the mind. It would be difficult to maintain the consistency of this Universe what with international travel and communication. Would all the phone numbers in the International directory actually connect to different people or would it not matter until they were actually called by the artifical intelligence? My thought was deep and meaningful and said something about the whole Universe whether or not we are real or a creation of God and annoyingly I can't remember what it was at all. In fact as I wrote those words, I had another thought and even that has gone fuzzy. That thought actually had something to do with the physical creation of our Universe, whether out of nothing from the Big Bang (sorry Fred) or from the collision of two "Branes", and was that it is still entirely possible that this creation has a cause. There was all that stuff about Starglider in The Fountains of Paradise about the Universe being just there and that Ockham's Razor stated that the most simple solution is always the probable one but intellectually for people untrained in the deep issues of cosmology, the intuitive next step to such answers as "There was nothing, no space, no matter and no time before the Big Bang" is "But what caused the Big Bang?" Even if you now accept that the Branes caused the Big Bang, what is outside this. Mathematics cannot solve the answer to the nothing before the Universe was created because it is entirely possible that the maths we use is peculiar to this Universe just as the angles of a triangle are peculiar to the surface it is formed on. In another Universe the square root of 2 may not be 1.414213... but some other number entirely but then again 2 would then be difficult to define. I don't think you can carry on this argument. It is like trying to imagine four spacial dimensions with a brain that only copes with three in reality. It is possible to imagine it but you can't provide any practical examples because they will not work in our world. Where was I before that digression? A creator of the Universe. Any artifical intelligence which we might create would necessarily have a limited Universe to work in though I have just thought that you could create an infinite randomness. Fractals (and I am thinking of the Mandelbrot set here) have infinite complexity where the limits are infinity. You could use a fractal to define a universal complexity; al you would have to do is feed in numbers and get the patterns out. All this is still digression which is just to help me forget that I thought of something rather wonderful and as usual have forgotton it. I then thought that, if the Universe is a creation of asomeone, then they should really have a filter to ensure that their creations do not think about this and whenever a thought which gets close to defining what is really going on, then it would be filtered out to ensure that the system does not think about itself. Of course in our world, many people think about what created us and everything else, either through religion or science which has just made me realise that at a deep level they are just different manifestations of mankind's desire to know where he comes from. Of course a lot of religion stops reasoned enquiry with the question of faith which is where this enquiry, reasoned or otherwise, must stop because we are, to use the Classical imagery of Dante, required to be back on our heads.

Some interesting stuff here but do monks really play Croquet? I would have though Rugby would have been much more their game.