Defining the universe

The atom bomb, dropped close to twenty years before we stepped into the halls of Gage Park had proved that matter and energy were the same thing, that’s where its power came from. When I got to college I discovered that the chemistry that Fulton had taught us was thirty years out of date, but I don’t believe that the good Doctor Small was that far out of date. I don’t remember him getting into relativity or particle physics, but I was never paying that much attention either.

They were still unsure about the big bang then. There were still holdouts for what they called the steady state which maintained that the universe in general is the same as it has always been, or would always be, but eventually the holdouts gave up.

And there were four forces of nature then, the electromagnetic, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and gravity. By now the weak and strong nuclear forces have been shown to be the same as the electromagnetic, but gravity still stands alone, like the cheese.

Have you ever been involved in the is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable argument? This one raged over the bar one afternoon long ago and led to a rare bit of insight. Once the dictionary was finally consulted, it was revealed that a fruit has a definite scientific definition, it is a certain organ of a plant, blah, blah, blah; a vegetable really was just defined as plant matter that we eat, oh and it couldn’t be sweet, unless it was like a sweet potato, and it couldn’t be a fruit, unless it was like a bell pepper. The definition didn’t have anything to do with what it was, just how it was used, it was the stuff on your plate that wasn’t meat or desert.

Like a chair, a chair could be anything you sit on, a Lazyboy, a box, a rock, just depends on what you’re sitting on. A cow however is a cow because of the way it is, because it has those four stomachs and goes moo, and no other animal does that. I think the rules of what makes an animal a member of its group and not another is who it can breed with. All cows can breed with all other cows (more or less), and no other animal. And all dogs can breed with all other dogs, and wolves too, so wolves and dogs are the same animal.

Let me try again on the digital/analog universe. I mean time and space, and real time and space, not theoretical time and space. Let’s try time, and let’s try film. If we examine a roll of film of me running, we will see one cell shows me at point A, and the next cell shows me at point B. At one point I was at point A, and at a later point I was at point B. But surely there was a point, C, between the A and B, and surely I had to pass through it to get from A to B. Not if it’s a digital universe. In a digital universe there would be no point C, and there would be no time interval between the two cells.

Of course these units of time and of space would be very small, nothing we can notice in our daily lives, like the way a dvd sounds like a record because the spaces between the ones and zeros are so small.

I think logic preceded us. I think it is an inherent part of the universe and we are discovering it rather than inventing it. It is like the Mississippi River which was just waiting to be found by us, as opposed to a Buick which would never exist unless we built it.