A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …
The coolest, and often most confusing thing about computer science, information theory, and perhaps reality in general, is how everything becomes more or less equivalent if you boil it down and twist it around a little.
Everything is sorting. Everything is compression. Everything is geometry. Everything is language. Everything is music. Everything is, like, waves, man. *puff*
Or more accurately, everything can be expressed in any of those other things’ terms.
These are not new ideas, but computers have made them provably and demonstrably true in many contexts, and I think that’s super cool.
I wouldn’t necessarily say it “tells us something about reality”, as the expression goes, but it is useful in describing reality. Like the last statement of waves, which was supposed to be an spaced out exageration, is how much of physics is built. You look at something and wonder how to describe it. Sometimes it make sense to start with a single pulse, wave, or oscillator, which does not solve it completely and so you add more perturbations to it. You do this sort of stuff basically everywhere in physics. Everywhere else, some other correspondence usually appear. In computer science you use hard problems to design cryptos, physics gets stuck at the same problems. String theory uses algebraic geometry and end up with models where the areas they cannot solve is where elliptic curve crypos come from.
Now we’re getting into linguistics with the question of “what is a wave?”
In quantum physics, basically everything is waves, in the sense that the same mathematical formulae used to describe waves are used to describe quantum phenomena. The intuitive human-scale dynamics of waves don’t necessarily apply though.
For example, sound waves can’t propagate through a vacuum, but light waves can. Aside from that, they follow mostly the same rules. You can use the same math the describe interference of sound waves and light waves, for example.
People talk about the “particle/wave duality” of photons because in some ways they behave like waves and in some ways they behave like particles. But both of those words are stretched a little from their everyday plain-english usage, and the precise reality would require years of study to understand.
Plain English wasn’t made to be that precise or objective. That’s why we use math. :)
I’m no expert in quantum physics so take this all with a grain of salt.
What I’m gathering is that “wave” can refer to a behavioral pattern that is substrate independent — it refers to a logical function more than it does an ontological presence. That said, quantum waves are a substrate that exists beneath the material manifestations you and I experience (called a “wave” more-or-less for its mathematical properties)?
If that’s fair, would it be correct to call the quantum wave a “substrate” as I did?
and you know another thing about quantum field theory I don’t quite understand… I think it still depends on a four dimensional backdrop universe, for these fields to pervade. That fourth dimension is time, which is function of entropy. If time exists, that means the backdrop isn’t static — it evolves. That means it needs a fundamental explanation as well, something more than being just a background. No?
It is worth looking up the Wave Equation and meditating on the fact that waves are solutions to a problem/set of conditions around conservation of energy.
It is an open ended definition not one that points out a discrete thing.
Surface waves for example such as Rayleigh Waves and Love Waves are solutions to the conservation of energy of a wave that cannot propagate past a free surface and thus energy in that direction must be conserved some other way through the solution of a surface wave.
The coolest, and often most confusing thing about computer science, information theory, and perhaps reality in general, is how everything becomes more or less equivalent if you boil it down and twist it around a little.
Everything is sorting. Everything is compression. Everything is geometry. Everything is language. Everything is music. Everything is, like, waves, man. *puff*
Or more accurately, everything can be expressed in any of those other things’ terms.
These are not new ideas, but computers have made them provably and demonstrably true in many contexts, and I think that’s super cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry–Howard_correspondence
Does it tell us something about reality if that’s true? I think it should… It reminds me of oneness.
I wouldn’t necessarily say it “tells us something about reality”, as the expression goes, but it is useful in describing reality. Like the last statement of waves, which was supposed to be an spaced out exageration, is how much of physics is built. You look at something and wonder how to describe it. Sometimes it make sense to start with a single pulse, wave, or oscillator, which does not solve it completely and so you add more perturbations to it. You do this sort of stuff basically everywhere in physics. Everywhere else, some other correspondence usually appear. In computer science you use hard problems to design cryptos, physics gets stuck at the same problems. String theory uses algebraic geometry and end up with models where the areas they cannot solve is where elliptic curve crypos come from.
The “everything is waves” part, yes.
But can everything be waves? Waves need to propagate through a substrate… so if everything is a wave, what is space?
Now we’re getting into linguistics with the question of “what is a wave?”
In quantum physics, basically everything is waves, in the sense that the same mathematical formulae used to describe waves are used to describe quantum phenomena. The intuitive human-scale dynamics of waves don’t necessarily apply though.
For example, sound waves can’t propagate through a vacuum, but light waves can. Aside from that, they follow mostly the same rules. You can use the same math the describe interference of sound waves and light waves, for example.
People talk about the “particle/wave duality” of photons because in some ways they behave like waves and in some ways they behave like particles. But both of those words are stretched a little from their everyday plain-english usage, and the precise reality would require years of study to understand.
Plain English wasn’t made to be that precise or objective. That’s why we use math. :)
I’m no expert in quantum physics so take this all with a grain of salt.
Thanks for the thorough reply!
What I’m gathering is that “wave” can refer to a behavioral pattern that is substrate independent — it refers to a logical function more than it does an ontological presence. That said, quantum waves are a substrate that exists beneath the material manifestations you and I experience (called a “wave” more-or-less for its mathematical properties)?
If that’s fair, would it be correct to call the quantum wave a “substrate” as I did?
and you know another thing about quantum field theory I don’t quite understand… I think it still depends on a four dimensional backdrop universe, for these fields to pervade. That fourth dimension is time, which is function of entropy. If time exists, that means the backdrop isn’t static — it evolves. That means it needs a fundamental explanation as well, something more than being just a background. No?
Subatomic particles are waves of probability.
It is worth looking up the Wave Equation and meditating on the fact that waves are solutions to a problem/set of conditions around conservation of energy.
It is an open ended definition not one that points out a discrete thing.
Surface waves for example such as Rayleigh Waves and Love Waves are solutions to the conservation of energy of a wave that cannot propagate past a free surface and thus energy in that direction must be conserved some other way through the solution of a surface wave.
https://visualpde.com/basic-pdes/wave-equation.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_equation
The second derivative (the acceleration) of energy in terms of time t is equal to the second derivative of energy in terms of distance x…
It suggests a basic back and forth transformation or equivalence at the heart of it, a wave is a relation embodied within physical constraints.
Disturbed vacuum. By waves and matter (which is made of “condensed” waves).
that’s probably generalized too far and reaches into pseudo-science.
Just understand the concept of Turing-completeness, and the idea that many systems are Turing equivalent.