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- From: dave@prim.demon.co.uk (Dave Griffiths)
- Newsgroups: sci.physics
- Subject: Re: The size of electrons, and Fanciful misc SAGA
- Message-ID: <1992Nov9.155216.18546@prim>
- Date: 9 Nov 92 15:52:16 GMT
- References: <1992Nov7.214329.24552@galois.mit.edu> <1992Nov8.154955.15938@prim> <1992Nov8.231641.28334@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU>
- Organization: Primitive Software Ltd.
- Lines: 31
-
- In article <1992Nov8.231641.28334@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> pratt@Sunburn.Stanford.EDU (Vaughan R. Pratt) writes:
- >
- >You are forgetting that scalability is a big concern today in CS.
- >Digital models don't scale gracefully, the bits look bigger. Smooth
- >scalability demands a smooth view of what one is scaling. A digital
- >view inhibits scalability.
- >
-
- Can you give an example of where scalability becomes a problem? Of course
- things don't look the same on smaller and smaller scales, but that's the
- whole point. If you take a smooth rod of metal, you can keep chopping it
- in half, but eventually you'll run up against a barrier of individual atoms -
- your scalability disappears.
-
- I think the notion that continuums exist is based upon our naive physical
- intuitions about the smoothness of things in the real world. At the back of
- our minds is the idea that that continues down to the microscopic scale. We
- now know that this is not the case. Working with digital computers allows
- us to form new physical intuitions about the structure of the world, ones
- that (to me) make more sense.
-
- Smoothness is ingrained very deep in physicists view of the world. It
- amazed me to read Feynman discussing a model of an electron as a smooth
- ball of charge (not to mention "point" charge) with all the mental problems
- that provokes of imagining the "stuff" of which an electron exists and chopping
- it in half etc.
-
- A digital view of the world neatly gets rid of all these problems. The only
- thing left to do is invent the new physics. :)
-
- Dave Griffiths
-