h a l f b a k e r y"Bun is such a sad word, is it not?" -- Watt, "Waiting for Godot"
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Someone should make a google that keeps track of every single atom
in th universe, of their location, their history and a prediction of
their future, which is constantly being updated and compared for
error. I think probably the information about how prediction based
on history -- and reality
-- differed, would end up being the most
valuable, because it would pinpoint the "magical" stuff, or the stuff
you still didn't know about.
The way to start on a project like this would be to catalog a really
tiny system of really large and measurable atoms, or I guess start
with a box full of ping pong balls in space, with the sides of the box
made out of screens made up of lasers and cameras, so that you
could identify each ball by it's unique measurement and then start
accumulating a history and making predictions and correcting against
the predictions.
And once you got that system pretty good you could move on to a
glob of really large molecules vaporized and suspended in a
superfluid state by magnets or something like that.
And the eventually you would have a real "current"-cy or information
about where everything currently is, was, and might be.
Eventually you would have to think about storing the information
inside the system itself, in a distributed way. I don't know how that
would work.
Laplace's demon
http://en.wikipedia...iki/Laplace's_demon
It is Laplace. I think Maxwell's demon is very small and operates an atomic scale trapdoor. [bungston, Aug 12 2012]
http://xkcd.com/824/
See the third line of this comic - Mrs Heisenberg: "I can't find my car keys" - Mr Heisenberg: "You probably know too much about their momentum" [hippo, Aug 14 2012]
[link]
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I have got started on this just now with an atom I have here. |
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What you propose has a name, and an associated daemon. LaPlace? Maxwell? I will check. |
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Thanks for that. Before i read the whole thing let me just
say that I keep thinking that even if you couldn't measure
the
location, histories and futures of every atom, the
difference between (what you did know and what that
allowed you to predict)-- and (what actually happened)
would tell you more and more about what you hadn't known
in the past, and that the frontier there would probably be
what goes on inside people's heads rather than what
happens in other places that are hard to get at to measure
like the inside of the earth. And so if you started a project
to be able to predict the futures of relatively independent
systems that you could use what you learned to start larger
and larger projects. |
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How exactly are you going to differentiate them
individually in order to keep track of them? |
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I guess you would start with the ping pong balls, so by a
combination of size and other individually indentifiable
qualities like temperature, speed, spin, and by the
probability that the measured particle is the same as a
previously measured particle based on similarity to
previous measurement and relation ship to nearby
particles. |
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so... keeping track of every single ping pong ball ? laudable, I suppose. |
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//keeping track// quantum thingummy. |
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There's only 3.2 x 10^89 of them. We're gonna need a
bigger ball of string. |
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Or vaguely redolent of Emo Phillips scheme of tearing a piece of paper in half repeatedly, to eventually split the atom. |
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I have a Mr. Heisenberg here, and he'd like to have a word with you. |
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//I have a Mr. Heisenberg here// Where? |
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- and what's his momentum? |
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Only one of those questions can be answered at a time ... |
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Then only ask one at a time. |
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