On 31 Mar 2013, at 18:03, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/31/2013 7:16 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 Joseph Knight <[email protected]> wrote:
> True or False: COMP implies that any fundamental physical
constant is non computable?
I still don't know exactly what "COMP" means but about 1860 Maxwell
computed the speed of light and that is certainly a fundamental
constant, not only that but his mathematics said that computed
speed of light would always be the same regardless of the speed of
the observer or of the source of the light. But of course Maxwell
didn't start from zero, he had to know what the values of the
magnetic constant and the electric constant are, and as far as we
know those numbers can only be obtained from experiment. At the
time electricity and magnetism didn't seem to have anything to do
with light but Maxwell showed that they did.
I thought the speed of light was 1.
Lol.
But even with the unities making the speed of light equal to 1, we
cannot be sure that in the next theory, to accommodate some unexpected
particles, we might need to accept that the speed of light is the
constant 0.9999999999999999999999996779435210033012878856... as
measured by some technology. And the question remains, is that
computable (algorithmically generable)?
With comp we can expect bad news, like it will take 400,000 years for
solving that problem, and showing that the speed of light is
determined by some constants appearing in the distribution of the twin
primes number, say. That would show that in some theory, the speed of
light is computable. But in the year 898,675,908, that theory will be
disproved, by measurement, making the question of the computability of
the speed of light still unsolved.
We can hope for the simple, but we can expect surprises and
complexities, and a growing ignorance awareness, proportional to a
deepening in the fundamentals. I think.
Bruno
Brent
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