From: Randy Smith (randysmith101@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Feb 23 2000 - 20:38:51 MST
To Eugene:
Thanks for posting the slides. I knew there were some around somewhere.
One of those slides now serves as wallpaper for my PC desktop.
Do you know if these are from a cryo-patient? James Gallagher, maybe?
Anyway, keep up the good work. I am more optimistic than you, but want much
more research.
On another note, here is an excerpt from the latest New Scientist article on
the nature of the universe. Any comments on the implications of this theory
for extro-cryo-immortalist hopes?
Begin excerpt:
IF YOU COULD LIFT A CORNER of the veil that shrouds reality, what would you
see beneath? Nothing but randomness, say two Australian physicists.
According to Reginald Cahill and Christopher Klinger of Flinders University
in Adelaide, space and time and all the objects around us are no more than
the froth on a deep sea of randomness.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that randomness is a part of the Universe.
After all, physicists tell us that empty space is a swirling chaos of
virtual particles. And randomness comes into play in quantum theory--when a
particle such as an electron is observed, its properties are randomly
selected from a set of alternatives predicted by the equations.
But Cahill and Klinger believe that this hints at a much deeper randomness.
"Far from being merely associated with quantum measurements, this randomness
is at the very heart of reality," says Cahill. If they are right, they have
created the most fundamental of all physical theories, and its implications
are staggering. "Randomness generates everything," says Cahill. "It even
creates the sensation of the 'present', which is so conspicuously absent
from today's physics."
Their evidence comes from a surprising quarter--pure mathematics. In 1930,
the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel stunned the mathematical world with
the publication of his incompleteness theorem. It applied to formal
systems--sets of assumptions and the statements that can be deduced from
those assumptions by the rules of logic. For example, the Greeks developed
their geometry using a few axioms, such as the idea that there is only one
straight line through any pair of points. It seemed that a clever enough
mathematician could prove any theorem true or false by reasoning from
axioms.
But Gödel proved that, for most sets of axioms, there are true theorems that
cannot be deduced. In other words, most mathematical truths can never be
proved.
This bombshell could easily have sent shock waves far beyond mathematics.
Physics, after all, is couched in the language of maths, so Gödel's theorem
might seem to imply that it is impossible to write down a complete
mathematical description of the Universe from which all physical truths can
be deduced. Physicists have largely ignored Gödel's result, however. "The
main reason was that the result was so abstract it did not appear to connect
directly with physics," says Cahill.
But then, in the 1980s, Gregory Chaitin of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research
Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, extended Gödel's work, and made a
suggestive analogy. He called Gödel's unprovable truths random truths. What
does that mean? Mathematicians define a random number as one that is
incompressible. In other words, it cannot be generated by an algorithm--a
set of instructions or rules such as a computer program--that is shorter
than the number. Chaitin defined random truths as ones that cannot be
derived from the axioms of a given formal system. A random truth has no
explanation, it just is.
The rest of it is here:
http://www.newscientist.com/features/features.jsp?id=ns22273
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