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kawa commented on Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++   twitter.com/bitfield/stat... · Posted by u/sawirricardo
guitarlimeo · a year ago
Did we watch the same movie? They got bunch of physics stuff right, like the water planet, the relative aging due to being near the massive black hole etc. Only thing that wasn't "correct" was the wormhole and especially the tesseract, but that was some creative writing which allowed for a nice twist. I enjoyed it, a nice scifi.
kawa · a year ago
Their starship was bullshit. On earth they needed a big Saturn 5 like rocket to bring it into space and later they fly into orbit like it's nothing.

If the planets they visited had much lower gravity then earth this may be possible, but this wasn't noticeable or talked about. And even on Mars you need much more fuel to get into orbit than could be stored in their tiny ship.

kawa commented on The Universe as a Computer   dabacon.org/pontiff/2024/... · Posted by u/dwighttk
LegionMammal978 · 2 years ago
> But if determinism falls out in the end, it's still a hint that there may also be deterministic effects at the root.

What I'm saying is that it's a hint of absolutely nothing. Deterministic systems can very easily produce deterministic large-scale behavior, and randomized systems can also very easily produce deterministic large-scale behavior. Since the large-scale behavior is the same either way, it gives us no predictive power over its ultimate cause, in the Bayesian sense.

> That's still deterministic. Sure, there may be some influence from quantum effects which then are amplified, but the dynamic of the chaotic system itself is still deterministic.

Your argument is that because we see "determinism falling out in the end", we should also expect "determinism at the root". But I argue that in the real world, we don't even see "determinism falling out in the end". On short timescales, computers appear to simulate finite-state machines, and the Earth appears to move in a steady pattern around the sun. But looking further out, the computer ultimately turns to dust, and the Earth wobbles out of its current path, thanks to the chaotic dynamics of the solar system. That doesn't sound very deterministic to me, unless we baselessly assume a priori that they have a deterministic cause.

What determinism do you argue does truly fall out in the end?

> That's not really true. "identical speed of light for all observers" is an observation which was replicated quite often. SR is a way to explain this observation, but there before SR Lorenz already had a different model explaining it too. SR won, because Lorenz used an (at the time) unobservable "ether" and Einstein argued that its better to use Occams Razor and throw this "ether" away.

In that case, we have two different interpetations that yield the exact same outcomes. Thus, I'd say that they're really just two different descriptions of the same model: they're equally correct, and Lorenz's description is just dispreferred due to being more difficult to work with.

> This in all contradicts SR, so maybe SR is really wrong on a global level.

There's nothing in SR that says that "most" matter can't follow the same reference frame. It just says that your reference frame has no bearing on the laws of physics you perceive, contrary to older models of the ether.

As I said, we already know that SR is wrong in that it doesn't predict any of the effects from GR, cosmology, etc. It's not an end-all-be-all theory of everything. But it doesn't stop it from giving good predictions for most places in the universe.

> Which in turn would allow a non-local, realistic interpretation of quantum measurements because without SR simultaneity could be back on the table.

You can do all that today, by specifying a reference frame that you want to consider. After all, that's how QFT does it, since it's mostly concerned about local effects. But you won't get different results from what SR predicts (in particular, the physics won't change if you look at the same system in a different reference frame), except in the circumstances where we already know it's incomplete.

kawa · 2 years ago
> What determinism do you argue does truly fall out in the end?

Mechanics is fully deterministic. The question is if there is some kind of "QM random generator" which mixes into this, making things nondeterministic in the end. But it's possible to separate both and the "big clumps of matter" part is fully deterministic then because decoherence generally happens so fast that it doesn't matter. You need to prepare systems quite carefully to mix quantum randomness into it (like in Schroedingers cat for example).

> In that case, we have two different interpetations that yield the exact same outcomes

Only for "harmless cases". SR allows lots of strange stuff, especially if combined with gravity. Closed timelike curves for example.

But if time is absolute and only slowed down for objects moving against this background, then closed timelike curves couldn't exit. Also the trick with Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates wouldn't work anymore because switching time and space would by unphysical. This way we wouldn't have to care about the singularity (at least in Schwarzschild BHs) anymore, because space would cease to exists behind the horizon of a BH and there would be no Singularity.

> You can do all that today, by specifying a reference frame that you want to consider

But that wouldn't work with measurement of entangled object, because there would be no way to define an absolute frame in which the change of the wave-function into an eigenstate happens, it would always depends on the frame of the observer. QM requires that the change happens simultaneously, but SR doesn't allow simultaneous events.

Of course the problem with all of this is, that in the moment I can't see a way to do experiments which decides if there is absolute time or if the SR is correct.

kawa commented on Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds (2019)   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
gs17 · 2 years ago
Weirdly, they seemed to understand that he wouldn't talk about politics out of self-preservation:

> When questioned about stories that seemed to allude to Stalinist conformism and paranoia, Lem said the same thing that Liu says about geopolitical interpretations of his trilogy—that he was not writing a veiled assessment of the present but merely making up stories.

kawa · 2 years ago
(Spoilers) I think that the part about the guy who's brain traveled to the Trisolarians and communicated back by telling a fairy-tale may be a story about the author himself: He's also in an authoritarian regime and unable to tell things face value, so he communicated by telling a "fairy-tale" (SF in his case) full of metaphors which needs to be decoded by the reader first to get the real meaning.

Ok, maybe I'm reading to much into it, but if it was to obvious, Liu would get intro trouble, so plausible deniability is important. But I think that the books are much more political as many think. But you need to decipher it first...

kawa commented on The Universe as a Computer   dabacon.org/pontiff/2024/... · Posted by u/dwighttk
LegionMammal978 · 2 years ago
> The universe behaves very deterministically if we look at "clumps of matter". Why is it this way when this determinism isn't already part of the "base"? For me that's at least a "suggestion". Not a proof of course, but still a hint.

Just because a system is randomized doesn't mean it's not predictable: when measured in certain ways, it will statistically tend to clump around certain states. Suppose that every second, I flip a magic random coin and walk either 2 feet forward or 1 foot backward. Then after a million seconds, you'll quite probably find me about half a million feet from where I started. Small-scale random processes can easily create something predictable on the large scale.

Still, I wouldn't characterize "clumps of matter" as being deterministic even in our everyday lives. There are many chaotic systems in this world, e.g., the weather, which can amplify randomness on the molecular level into a completely different state. Even the orbit of the Earth becomes unpredictable after several million years.

> I'm even sceptical about special relativity: It's a good model and works well in most occasions, but it may still be wrong on a fundamental level. Most of the assumptions under which Einstein proposed SR (no QM, static universe) don't hold anymore.

Special relativity is already 'wrong' in that it doesn't predict any of our observations of general relativity. But it unavoidably has plenty of truth in it, in that it is very succesful at predicting an identical speed of light for all observers, and the effects (e.g., time dilation) that that implies. Any superseding theory has to explain the same observations, at which point special relativity will continue to act as a useful model for the large-scale effects.

kawa · 2 years ago
> Just because a system is randomized doesn't mean it's not predictable

That's of course true (In fact I tend to also believe in a non-deterministic universe "at the core").

But if determinism falls out in the end, it's still a hint that there may also be deterministic effects at the root. Current observation can't rule that out, it's just our model which assumes pure randomness. But there are lot's of possibilities how randomness can sneak in into QM which doesn't contradict obserservation.

And unless we solve the measurement problem in QM (by finding a unified theory from which both Schoedingers equations and Borns rule can be derived), it's still an open question. So considering it solved today is quite premature.

> ... chaotic systems ...

That's still deterministic. Sure, there may be some influence from quantum effects which then are amplified, but the dynamic of the chaotic system itself is still deterministic.

> (SR) ... predicting an identical speed of light for all observers

That's not really true. "identical speed of light for all observers" is an observation which was replicated quite often. SR is a way to explain this observation, but there before SR Lorenz already had a different model explaining it too. SR won, because Lorenz used an (at the time) unobservable "ether" and Einstein argued that its better to use Occams Razor and throw this "ether" away.

But Einstein didn't now about QFT, the Big-Bang and the microwave-background - which all contradict Einsteins assumptions: QFT uses an "ether-like" vacuum, the Big-Bang created a "T=0" for the universe and with the microwave-background also an absolute reference frame for an absolute time. This in all contradicts SR, so maybe SR is really wrong on a global level.

Which in turn would allow a non-local, realistic interpretation of quantum measurements because without SR simultaneity could be back on the table.

kawa commented on The Universe as a Computer   dabacon.org/pontiff/2024/... · Posted by u/dwighttk
titzer · 2 years ago
> But models tend to break down if you look close enough, and I think this may also happen to QM at some point.

Sure, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that it will be some kind of deterministic computation underneath.

> We do - at least as long we look at clumps of matter.

Not even. Even non-quantum clumps of matter are influenced by continuous fields and dilation effects from both special and relativity. Even without QM, our universe is not efficiently simulatable on our computational models because of general relativity.

kawa · 2 years ago
> Sure, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that it will be some kind of deterministic computation underneath

The universe behaves very deterministically if we look at "clumps of matter". Why is it this way when this determinism isn't already part of the "base"? For me that's at least a "suggestion". Not a proof of course, but still a hint.

> ... because of general relativity.

General relativity doesn't fits together with QM, so either one is (or both are) "wrong" (in the sense that they only approximate reality to a certain degree).

I'm even sceptical about special relativity: It's a good model and works well in most occasions, but it may still be wrong on a fundamental level. Most of the assumptions under which Einstein proposed SR (no QM, static universe) don't hold anymore.

kawa commented on The Universe as a Computer   dabacon.org/pontiff/2024/... · Posted by u/dwighttk
titzer · 2 years ago
Not really. The best models that we have to explain measurable physical phenomenon are wave equations from quantum mechanics that describe probably distributions. There have been proposals for nearly a century that a deterministic model underlies this, but they have to contend with observed phenomenon and inconveniences like Bell's Theorem that suggest that our universe just isn't deterministic.

That said, we don't have a unified theory of the universe. General relativity, the dark matter question, and quantum mechanics have not been unified into any mathematical theory. All of those theories are pretty weird, mathematically. And we have no efficient way to simulate on classical computers the models that we do have.

We don't live in a billiard ball universe. It's a CS fantasy that evaporates as soon as you start doing experiments on matter and energy in the actual universe we are in.

kawa · 2 years ago
> The best models

Yes, models. But a model doesn't need to be "real", it just models something real to a certain extent. But models tend to break down if you look close enough, and I think this may also happen to QM at some point.

Bell's Theorem doesn't rule out determinism, it only rules out hidden variables. If the universe is non-local, Bell's theorem fits well with determinism.

> We don't live in a billiard ball universe

We do - at least as long we look at clumps of matter. The billiard ball universe breaks down if we look at the constituents of matter but somehow it re-remerges if we put enough of those constituents together. It's probably the biggest riddle in Physics why this happens. But it does.

kawa commented on Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011)   english.stackexchange.com... · Posted by u/ent101
kawa · 2 years ago
"Thou" sounds very similar to german "du" which is the current informal form. In older german the second person plural ('Ihr', similar to "vous" french from which "you" may come) was also the formal form, but it's out of fashion for a few centuries now.
kawa commented on The Flix Programming Language   flix.dev/... · Posted by u/sivakon
usrbinbash · 2 years ago
Yes and no.

In theory, writing in a functional language that allows only "pure" functions (aka. functions w.o. side effects), makes it easier to control state.

In practice, side effects exists and are required for programs to do anything useful.

In my opinion, one mistake of many purely functional languages was to be so focused on this purity, that it made it needlessly hard to write useful code in them, especially for people coming from an imperative/procedural/oop style of doing things. And you need these people if you want your method to gain traction, because the vast majority of code written, is imperative.

The irony is, that FP could probably have had a lot more success if it didn't clamour on about pure functions so much, and was less focused on implementations (aka. languages) than on methodology (aka. coding style) Because it is perfectly possible to write pure functions in most languages, including OOP language, even if those functions are not "pure" internally, or are not "pure" all the time and under all circumstances.

And yes, doing so has really nice advantages. I have refactored quite alot of codebases into using a more functional approach, and what I found was that this makes it harder to introduce bugs, makes it easier to track bugs, and makes it easier to reason about my code.

So yeah, functional programming, used if and where it makes sense, does work, and is useful.

kawa · 2 years ago
An "unpure FP" is a procedural programming language, because "unpure functions" are generally called "procedures".

But people tend to avoid the name "procedural" at all cost - which is bad because procedural programming really has it's advantages and should be clearly separated from FP which also has certain advantages.

kawa commented on The Flix Programming Language   flix.dev/... · Posted by u/sivakon
brabel · 2 years ago
> OOP simply came first

Not really. Lisp is a functional programming language and has existed since at least 1960. Some claim there were many other proto-functional languages since the early 60's, and the FP language [1] (a clearly functional programming language and the result of the famous paper "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?") appeared in 1977 - was inspired by much earlier efforts like APL.

OOP really only became a thing with Simula in 1967, but was not popular until the 1980's with Smalltalk and Common Lisp's Object System (CLOS) came about (so yes, there was a OOP/FP hybrid already decades ago), and then C++ and finally Java much later... at which time Functional Programming languages already included Miranda (1985) which later evolved into Haskell, and Erlang (1986). That is, FPP languages were at least as common as OOP languages by the 80's.

As far as I know, however, pure functional languages were not really very efficient until Haskell came about, while OOP languages were nearly on par with procedural style: which mattered a lot in 1980's machines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP_(programming_language)

kawa · 2 years ago
Lisp is not a FP. It's a "List processing language" with some features based on Lambda calculus.

Real FP means referential transparency and that started with languages like Miranda and later Haskell.

What many people consider "FP" today is in fact just procedural programming with higher order procedures and lexical closure.

kawa commented on No Code   vas3k.com/blog/nocode/... · Posted by u/severine
kleiba · 6 years ago
The second sentence ("First, you work all month, and then you give half of the money to those who didn't work.") is already so blatantly wrong and reactionary that I almost have to force myself to read on - after all, if the premise is already flawed what good can come of it?
kawa · 6 years ago
It's a little hyperbole but in principle it's true, especially in Germany. Of course you can like the concept of redistribution of income and wealth, but that doesn't makes it "blatantly wrong and reactionary".

u/kawa

KarmaCake day61December 6, 2013View Original