The idea of science being discovered relies on one erroneous assumption: our vision of the world, as human beings, is an absolute truth. I want to mention a very interesting scene from the movie "What the bleep do we know?".
In that particular scene, Dr Quantum visits a special place called Flatland. Flatland is a 2D world where the idea of "up" and "down" doesn't exist. You either go forward, backward, left or right. Dr Quantum, being the 3D person that we all are, stands above one of the creatures of Flatland and start talking to her. This creature was afraid because even though she could hear him, she couldn't understand where he was.
That's a really interesting idea. What if there's a dimension us as human beings couldn't grasp. We obviously see the world in 2 dimensions:
- Space (which is by itself a 3D environment)
- Time
If there are other dimensions, then surely our vision of the world comes from our perception and is therefore subjective. Since it is not absolute, it must be invented. And until proven wrong, these theories are generally adopted. When Einstein discovered some strange properties about the time-space environment, he proved wrong Newton's theories, even though they had led the Man's quest to walk on the moon.
The reason I'm telling you this is because something occurred to me today. I've known for a long time that it was al-Khwarizmi who allegedly invented the number 0. But how great this invention really was, that I didn't realize. It hit me today when working on a computer science homework. Programmers start counting from 0. So let's say you have ten items in a table, the first item would be in cell number 0. Why do they do that? I keep getting amazed at how stupid machines really are. And here is yet another example.
Have you ever wondered why a ten is written 10? That is because modern languages use a 10-element alphabet to represent numbers. The alphabet is constitured of ten "figures". They are "0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8" and "9". Why just ten? Why not eight or sixteen? It's a safe assumption to believe that Man instinctively stopped at 10, the number of fingers he has on both hands. We do still use our fingers to count, right?Machines are dumb. It will blindly assign the first "figure" to the first "number". Intuitively when counting the first number is one. Think of old roman numbers, they start with I. So this shows to some extent that the number 0 was a pure subjective invention, that was generally adopted as a convention. It was not a natural truth.
We do like to use other alphabets in computer science, like binary (2 figures), octal (8 figures) and hexadecimal (16 figures). There's a big fork of algebra called Boolean algebra focused on binaries. And here's a joke I love:
There is only 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binaries and those who don't.
By inventing the number 0, alKhwarizmi led the way to invent something far greater. Number 0 was more than just a language convention. Indeed it opened the way for something far greater: negatives. If 0 had never been invented, what would it mean to say "negative five"? What's a negative number, if not a number inferior to 0? Science would have looked pretty different without the negative numbers today.
NOW you've got me going.. you shouldn't have done this, but okay...
ReplyDeletehere's something you might like: we didn't invent the laws of science, we effectively discovered them: Newton's gravity, archimedes in his bath and all that horseshit.. we needed a simple, easy way to express these ideas and concepts without the ambiguities and dumb complications of language: and so we invented maths! Now until maybe mid-18th century (not sure; check it), we were only interested in applied maths: what we saw in the real world, we tried to model. point. then some crazy fuckers tried to model the abstract: bernouilli and pascal with probability are a great example of this(what IS a 1/6 probability anyway?). up to here, it was okay, the idea of probability pervades our world, so we can kind of understand what it means.. then some other crazier fuckers pushed it further, and started developing concepts completely INDEPENDENT of the REAL WORLD, not EVEN based on some abstract model we can witness in the real world, just taking an idea in analysis, for example- square root of -1, anyone? :)- and expanding it further and further diligently until maths became a thing of its own, completely detached of the chains that were stupidly keeping it attached to our boring world: they dubbed it pure maths. the fields considered as pure maths were completely devoid of applications in the beginning of the 20th century (e.g: complex numbers don't exist in nature; number theory was just some crazy geeks having fun and playing around with numbers; cantor sets: everyone laughed at george cantor when he came up with his R set and his different types of infinities...). the scientific community, as a whole, was understandably skeptical and dismissed all of this theoretical mumbo-jumbo as bull.. plus there were these other nutjob physicians called einstein and heisenberg actually USING some of these concepts to explain real hard PHYSICS, now would you believe it ma'am? until, well, you know, relativity was witnessed in space and actually proven true, particle physics and the atomic age came along, computers established number theory as a serious field with applications such as cryptography and all of the cool number bases every computer scientist uses (binary, hex...), telecommunications used complex analysis even though the complex domain doesn't exist... etc... So to summarize, we created a language called maths from a few basic axioms that originally, nature itself had inspired (addition, commutativity..), we used maths as a language to model the real physical world, then we realized: well shit, maths is in fact a huge imaginary multi-dimensional world and our real world is only a special case, a SUBSET, of the imaginary world created by maths.. proof: some of maths imaginary laws apply to stuff we can't PERCEIVE with our puny 5 senses, waves for example (how do you visualize an electromagnetic wave? how do you visualize the wind? you only see their effects on nature, nothing else).. let's face it, we only discovered 0.00000...01% of the secrets and multiple dimensions our world hides from us, and we've been doing it all wrong from day 1, using our eyes/nose/ears/touch/taste to do it.. still we got very neat stuff out of even that, but it's far from over: that's what makes it so interesting to be a mathematician/physicist/chemist/hey why not engineer? (NOT a doctor; doctors are boring,right annibal? now a genetics dude, THAT's interesting.. or a brain neurosurgeon..) kind of proves your point in a way even though I started by contradicting you, right joe? ;)
N.B: i might be talking out of my ass here, this is just my way of seeing things, none of this is vigorously verified, so if you think i've got it all wrong and have a different, more interesting opinion, by all means, the floor is yours, and let the games begin
wow.. didn't know it looked that big.. now no one's going to read it.. oh well..
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. We'll talk about it.
ReplyDelete"If there are other dimensions, then surely our vision of the world comes from our perception and is therefore subjective"
ReplyDeleteMay I add that as evolution goes, the human brain will grow to perceive those things we can't see, by having more acute senses,transforming us into what we call today "superheroes".
Who knows? Maybe. If we are influenced by those dimensions, then evolution will find a way to get them. It happened many times before. But what if evolution was not biologic this time. Up until the 80s, people would dream of biologic "superpowers". But it is becoming clear now that evolution is about human/machine interactions. At least on the short term. The way we interact with machines define our lives more then ever, and it is that that will differentiate generations. I'm having troubles understanding what my younger sister's generation is going through, let alone my 10 year old cousin's ...
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