Unfortunately for our Ad Hoc Meeting of the Outer Banks Cosmological Society, I had to interrupt a conversation that was just gathering a full head of steam when my eldest child’s bedtime arrived, and I left to read Dr. Seuss and sing songs, after which I fell asleep. Zoe did not fall asleep, which has caused me to re-evaluate the bedtime routine, but that is not pertinent to this continuation of the Ad Hoc Meeting, which has now become a High Latency Correspondence rather than an Ad Hoc Meeting, I suppose.
When we left, I was just asking you to imagine the shortest-possible duration of time. I proposed that this duration would be marked by the singular fact that any duration shorter would be the duration between one instant and another which would occur at the exact same time. If you’ll bear with me, I know it sounds sort of Zeno’s-Paradox-ical right now; I assure you it will become even more so shortly.
The next step in my narrative was to ask you to perform the same thought experiment with a distance: to imagine the shortest-possible distance. This would be marked by a similarly singular fact: any shorter distance would be between two points at the exact same place. The third and last step in the thought experiment is to extend this narrative to size, and to imagine the smallest-possible thing. Any smaller thing would have no size whatsoever.
Now, in our Ad Hoc Meeting of the Outer Banks Cosmological Society, I skipped a few steps, and jumped straight to some largely irrelevant conclusion (I think it was, “gravity is emergent” or something of that sort). But where I really wanted to take the conversation (if one can “take” a conversation somewhere without it becoming a soliloquy) was to an easier point, of which the gravity point is merely one example: anything which can be observed is necessarily an emergent property of a system.
The substrate of existence (if it can be properly considered a substrate) is made up of glorious paradoxes such as have no particular location, no particular duration, no color or sound or temperature or strong and weak nuclear forces. This is true because each of these requires such a phenomenally complex system (trace, for instance, the color elicited by a single photon, in all its intricate wonder), that separated from the system they exhibit an exquisite banality comparable only to something less beautiful than physics, such as poetry.
Anyhow, thanks for the conversation, and hopefully this is enough of a bookmark to pick up where we left off.
Best,
David.
Yer a thinkiess lad – I like readin’ yer stuff even if I don’t quite get it. xoxo
Sorry if this HCL was a little more latent than you hoped, hopefully I can slip in before the final gavel. My internet-accessible times this week got filled up with playing with my beach pictures and pretending to still be at the beach. :-) Also, even as late in the morning as it is, it still seems a bit early for straight tequila, which I thought was a necessity for a Meeting of the Outer Banks Cosmological Association, but I’ll do my best without. When I was about 13, I went through a phase where I was going to me a cosmologist, and Dad constantly told me I was going to be a cosmetologist. I mention this because I think you said @ Nags Head that I’d spent the past 4 years learning how to be antagonized, but you see, it’s been much longer than that.
Anyway, I don’t disagree that emergence is both interesting and important, and I even sort of like the emergent definition of physics in the next post. But I don’t quite understand the rest of your argument, so I’m not sure whether to disagree or whether I’m just confused. My default reaction in this case is, of course, to be argumentative (as I’m sure my brother or husband would be glad to assure you), so here goes. First, I still don’t really see what this has to do with Zeno’s paradox. It sort of seems like you’re saying that since we can (at least in a thought experiment) divide any property (e.g. distance, time, energy, mass, etc.) into infinitely smaller bits, so small that no information can really be carried, that that means that any information we can actually understand actually has to be made up of multiple bits and is therefore emergent. Is that getting somewhere close? I accidentally made a computer science-y sort of pun there, but it makes me think of another way to phrase what I think you might mean: you can divide a piece of information into 1′s and 0′s and thus have indivisible pieces of information called “bits”, but if you don’t have any context to use for deciphering those bits, there isn’t really any information there. If that’s what you mean, I think my reaction is that, it’s true that we as humans probably can’t understand things like electrons or quarks or bosons without context, and anyway, what would that even mean, since you don’t get to the point of discussing such things without bringing along mental baggage. But I don’t think that makes things that are so fundamental as to be beyond our understanding banal, rather beautifully mysterious, maybe in the same way that Zeno’s paradox, or integrals, are. On the other hand, I decided to become a biophysicist instead of a cosmologist, so maybe that tells you something about where my real interests lie if we’re making a scale from fundamental to emergent.
When’s the next meeting?
Ha! The last two sentences of the first paragraph were marked with a fake HTML tag marking them as a digression but apparently the website removed/hid that when the comment posted. So I’m not quite as spastic as that sounds!
One time, not too long ago, a nerd from up north traveled down to the outer banks. He lathered his nerdy head with sunscreen, so as not to absorb too much wisdom from the healing power of the southern suns rays. While others frolicked in the ocean’s lapping waves, he sat and dreamed of card catalogs. He occupied his time thinking of particles and spaces, until a sweet small angel beckoned him to come lie down beside her, where she had him read stories and sing songs concerning real matters of consequence which filled his mind and calmed his soul until he, now right with the world again, drifted off to a sound sweet sleep.