Today’s xkcd captures an important insight.
Click for the whole thing. (Update: Darn it, Cosma Shalizi got there before me.)
Today’s xkcd captures an important insight.
Click for the whole thing. (Update: Darn it, Cosma Shalizi got there before me.)
Comments
8 responses to “Perspective is Bidirectional”
When I finally started to prepare for my Hodge Theory exam You give link like this. Now I have no choice but to go through the whole archive.
I love xkcd.
LOL. “I love the punchline.”
Thanks for brightening an otherwise dreary Chicago day.
Elliot
Ironic that this involves Hamilton. Wasn’t he out walking with his wife when he came up with the formulas for quaternions and carved them on a nearby bridge. Obviously, neither he nor his wife had any paper, and they were Victorians.
I laughed, but I’m not showing it to the “physics widow”.
I’ve just read your post about the Boltzman Brains.
I’d like to have my comment anyway, and here your opinion about it.
1.during a transition from a low entropic state to a higher one, in the Boltzman entropy curve, there’s a possibility of having the nested moves against the
current direction of change in entropy. For example in the midst of going from a low entropy situation, to a higher level a region can experiance a movement toward lower entropy state, and it can happen again and again in a nested fashion.
In this case, we would observe a mixture of higher and lower entropy past. Isn’t this the case for us?
2.The main essence of a theory about the formation of universe is the proper justification of current situation, and the secondary condition would be simplicity.
But considering the Boltzman universe, current situation of the universe has the lowest (and exactly the lowest 🙂 ) probability of existance.
The theory minimizes the first variable instead of maximizing it.
I can so see a scene similar to that one in Dangerous Liaisons, only this time the poor woman is covered in formulas. “You cannot bathe, do not shower, put on your robe and come with me to my lab!”
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