Sunday, September 03, 2006

 

JSH: Harris integral?

I'm not quite sure about this website:

http://sciphysicsopenmanuscript.blogspot.com/

But hey, I read over it, and what I saw when I did so made enough sense that I thought I'd elevate the attention given to it a bit and take the opportunity to talk about discrete mathematics and physics.

I don't know if the "Harris" in things like the Harris integral on the website is supposed to be about me, but I like the topic of discussion on the first post. I don't know anything about the person doing the blog so I'm not really endorsing it, as I hedge a bit in case it is some weird flame thing from the math community.

But hey, on to the idea that I see which is that Planck length is the smallest length in our universe, with the idea that we live in a discrete reality.

So you can say there is no way to consider knowing an absolute length as if our meter has meaning outside of this reality, as we can just go down to the Planck length and just find out how many of those lengths fit into a meter or a foot.

And, wasn't the meter started off of the average length of a man's arm? And the foot just came from, well, feet length?

So, we don't know what in some absolute sense any length is, just what it is relative to the smallest length in out reality.

That has huge consequences for physics because it implies that ultimately mathematics in physic will be discrete mathematics, which I know is terrifying to many as discrete mathematics is harder.

But hey, that's reality.

I am curious about current efforts in using discrete ideas in physics, who is tops in this area and what is the current research?

Oddly enough to me, as when I was a physics student years ago, I didn't care about discrete mathematics, a lot of what I've been doing the last few years is discrete mathematics, figuring out number theory stuff, which totally bored me as a teenager, and the more I consider things with primes, the more I'm impressed with the possibility of remarkable answers from a shift from a continuous view.

Sorry Cauchy, but it's time to move on.

And, oh yeah, what is the point?

Well, if the proper direction now for physics is into the discrete, then the next generation of science has not been done yet, and technology follows science, so the next generation of technology is not yet possible.

My own hope—a lot to do with how I've taken so much crap over the years from some very insulting people—is that the next generation of science will lead to technologies that put us deep into space, for real, like out to distant stars.

Technologies that will give us the ability to move out into the stars as explorers, where what's actually possible, and what the future brings is beyond what any science fiction ever dreamed, where science and technology take us beyond the simple concepts of space travel, and space ships of Star Trek, or Star Wars and other popular fictional approaches, in a way that is currently, hard to imagine.





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