OFF: SETI, ETs

[M Holmes]

Paul Mather writes:

> On Thu, 11 Jul 1996, M Holmes wrote:
>
> > I was recently at a lecture here by one of the local theoretical physics
> > gurus. He was talking about how a Grand Universal Theory (including all
> > four Forces) is highly likely within ten or twenty years (current
> > accelerators are close to the energy required to have a good look at the
> > symmetry breakdown point of gravity or somesuch). Before the lecture I'd
> > always wondered how particles like the neutrino et al could have no
> > mass. After the lecture I realised that the real question is why some
> > particles do have mass. It's a pretty weird property.
>
> A very interesting book I read a couple of months ago concerned itself
> with "the reductionist nightmare."  One of its conclusions is that a
> "theory of everything" (the physicists Holy Grail) is pretty useless in
> terms of understanding because you couldn't use it to predict any
> phenomena beyond the very minute scale upon which it focuses.

Well I dunno. You could use it to predict the ultimate fate of the
Universe. How much bigger would you want?

> Worse
> still, its "language" is not that which would provide a coherent
> explanation of large-scale phenomena in terms we understand in the domain
> of the phenomena.  (Try and map the interactions of massive numbers of
> elementary particles comprising a cat and a bowl of food to the concept
> "the cat is eating because it is hungry"---not that you could simulate
> such a huge conglomeration of particles, anyway.)

Sure. Most of the questions it'd enable us to answer are very much in
the realms of cosmology and philosophy. OTOH, I'm personally more
interested in questions of the order of "Where did the Universe come
from?" than "How do I get my cat to quit spraying?". Then again, I'm
well known to be weird.

> > I'm having a lot of difficulty not seeing the Universe as some kind of
> > finite automata simulation lately.
>
> Or cellular automata...

Yup. Greg Egan's "Permutation City" story has an interesting spin on
this one.

> Paul.

FoFP