My reality tunnel
Watch this space for a collection of amusing things found on the Web.
See also superadditive.com. Any questions?
October 29, 2011
October 27, 2011
“ I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts. ”
Excerpt from The Pleasure of Finding Things out by Richard P. Feynman
October 26, 2011
“ [L]et me make the bold suggestion that perhaps in a few decades we shall see what nonhuman mathematics looks like. I am not predicting the imminent arrival of little green men from outer space, but simply the invasion of mathematics by computers. Since the human brain is a sort of natural computer, I see no reason why the artificial variety could not perform better in the specialized task of doing mathematical research. My guess is that, within fifty or a hundred years (or it might be one hundred and fifty) computers will successfully compete with the human brain in doing mathematics, and that their mathematical style will be rather different from ours. Fairly long computational verifications (numerical or combinatorial) will not bother them at all, and this should lead not just to different sorts of proofs but more importantly to different sorts of theorems being proved.
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October 25, 2011
October 20, 2011
October 5, 2011
October 3, 2011
October 1, 2011
September 28, 2011
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