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It's about the story and the people behind the objects. You could create an exact atomic replica of the Mona Lisa, but it still wouldn't be THE Mona Lisa that D

It's about the story and the people behind the objects. You could create an exact atomic replica of the Mona Lisa, but it still wouldn't be THE Mona Lisa that Da Vinci sat in front of and painted with his own hands. From a purely material perspective they're the same, but from the perspective of historical narrative there's a big difference, and that matters to some people. In other words, people aren't placing value in the arrangement of atoms, they're placing value in the context of how those atoms came to be arranged that way. The original object is a token of that context.

lisper 8y ago
> You could create an exact atomic replica of the Mona Lisa, but it still wouldn't be THE Mona Lisa that Da Vinci sat in front of and painted with his own hands. Actually, it would. That is the definition of "exact atomic replica". Did you read the article I linked to?
- mirimir 8y ago
  Yes, it's an "exact atomic replica". But it's still a replica, and not the original. And really, "did you read" gets boring quickly.
  - lisper 8y ago
    Well, if you had read it you would understand why there really is no difference between an original and an exact atomic replica. Just as it makes no sense to distinguish between two copies of Microsoft Word and call one "the original", it makes no sense to distinguish between two atomically identical objects. (Or at the very least you would know that there is an argument for this position, to which you might have actually been able to muster a counter-argument rather than simply proclaiming with no supporting evidence whatsoever that "it's still a replica and not the original." No, an exact atomic replica is not "just a replica". But I'm not going to recapitulate the entire argument here.)
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Dude, of course I read it. I just disagree. And with you. > ... muster a counter-argument rather than simply proclaiming with no supporting evidence whatsoever that "it's still a replica and not the original." It's you who are missing the point. One can have supporting evidence about which is the original. I mean, just consider the Mona Lisa. How do we know which of the many copies of that painting are the original? We arguably don't know that through any sort of measurement. Because Da Vinci and the early owners didn't have the technology to make necessary measurements. So what would we compare our results to? Maybe one could get at it through radiochemical dating, but even that's iffy. Anyway, how we know which is the original is through the chain of custody. And that also applies to atomically exact copies.
      - lisper 8y ago
        > How do we know which of the many copies of that painting are the original? We arguably don't know that through any sort of measurement. Of course we do. We can, for example, carbon-date the wood that the original is painted on. We can do chemical analysis of the pigments. There are a lot of ways to distinguish a real Rennaissance painting from a modern copy. But (and this is the main point) only because the technology we have for making copies of paintings is not yet perfected. If we could make an atomically perfect copy of the Mona Lisa, it would be absolutely indistinguishable from the original.
        mirimir 8y ago
        First, we don't know exactly when the Mona Lisa was painted. From Wikipedia: > ... It had been believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506; however, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. Recent academic work suggests that it would not have been started before 1513. It was acquired by King Francis I of France ... So what we rely on here is custody records, all the way back to King Francis I. Also, why limit the discussion to modern copies? Again, from Wikipedia: > A version of Mona Lisa known as Mujer de mano de Leonardo Abince ("Leonardo da Vinci's handy-woman") held in Madrid's Museo del Prado was for centuries considered to be a work by Leonardo. However, since its restoration in 2012 it is considered to have been executed by one of Leonardo's pupils in his studio at the same time as Mona Lisa was being painted. Basically, it was a copy, painted at about the same time. Now imagine that King Francis I liked the Mona Lisa so much that he had one or more copies created. How would we know now which was the original? Only via records.
mirimir 8y ago
Yes, for the Mona Lisa, what's special is that Da Vinci painted it.
- raattgift 8y ago
  Quoting lisper (at the article on his website), 'All you have to do is to try to define what "the same thing" actually means.' (emphasis his). He is trying to define it in a way that the people who he is interacting with here don't agree with. It's a bit incongruous to point to an article that claims, "Arrangement is everything" (emphasis his), and then proceed to consider the arrangements of atoms in a painting without considering the arrangement of the painting with respect to other things, and especially not with respect to everything. At a chosen time coordinate, the painting and its replica (down to their subatomic constituents) occupy a non-overlapping range of coordinates in space. They are different because of the arrangement. Yet his argument is that they are the same because of arrangement (but only of the atomic components of each). More importantly, at a time coordinate in which Leonardo da Vinci was alive and the original Mona Lisa painting existed, there was only one such painting -- any atomically perfect duplicate comes much later, and it's that arrangement in time that is important in your arguments, which I agree with. More generally, otherwise-identical extended composite objects differ because the average of their components' worldtubes are essentially non-overlapping and diverge (or converge, depends on which way you want to think about timelike directions in this context) at different points in spacetime. In the case of our paintings the divergence happens at the tip of the paintbrush Leonardo da Vinci applied his completing stroke with, versus in the Star Trek style replicator. The value of these paintings are position-dependent, and history-dependent. Position and history (combined they are the worldline, or worldtube for extended objects) are degrees of freedom that does not vanish by physics tricks, although it is easy to neglect them when their effects are small, and neglecting them makes calculations much simpler. But the effect of position and history on the paintings' value is not small, or at least I think it would not be small for most assessors of value (although lisper claims he would value them equally).
  - mirimir 8y ago
    > More generally, otherwise-identical extended composite objects differ because the average of their components' worldtubes are essentially non-overlapping and diverge (or converge, depends on which way you want to think about timelike directions in this context) at different points in spacetime. This is a great way to express the historical aspect in physics-speak. That is, the object isn't just a spacelike thing at some particular time. It's a spacetime thing. I can't quite imagine how one could duplicate that.

lisper 8y ago

> You could create an exact atomic replica of the Mona Lisa, but it still wouldn't be THE Mona Lisa that Da Vinci sat in front of and painted with his own hands. Actually, it would. That is the definition of "exact atomic replica". Did you read the article I linked to?

mirimir 8y ago
Yes, it's an "exact atomic replica". But it's still a replica, and not the original. And really, "did you read" gets boring quickly.
- lisper 8y ago
  Well, if you had read it you would understand why there really is no difference between an original and an exact atomic replica. Just as it makes no sense to distinguish between two copies of Microsoft Word and call one "the original", it makes no sense to distinguish between two atomically identical objects. (Or at the very least you would know that there is an argument for this position, to which you might have actually been able to muster a counter-argument rather than simply proclaiming with no supporting evidence whatsoever that "it's still a replica and not the original." No, an exact atomic replica is not "just a replica". But I'm not going to recapitulate the entire argument here.)
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Dude, of course I read it. I just disagree. And with you. > ... muster a counter-argument rather than simply proclaiming with no supporting evidence whatsoever that "it's still a replica and not the original." It's you who are missing the point. One can have supporting evidence about which is the original. I mean, just consider the Mona Lisa. How do we know which of the many copies of that painting are the original? We arguably don't know that through any sort of measurement. Because Da Vinci and the early owners didn't have the technology to make necessary measurements. So what would we compare our results to? Maybe one could get at it through radiochemical dating, but even that's iffy. Anyway, how we know which is the original is through the chain of custody. And that also applies to atomically exact copies.
    - lisper 8y ago
      > How do we know which of the many copies of that painting are the original? We arguably don't know that through any sort of measurement. Of course we do. We can, for example, carbon-date the wood that the original is painted on. We can do chemical analysis of the pigments. There are a lot of ways to distinguish a real Rennaissance painting from a modern copy. But (and this is the main point) only because the technology we have for making copies of paintings is not yet perfected. If we could make an atomically perfect copy of the Mona Lisa, it would be absolutely indistinguishable from the original.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        First, we don't know exactly when the Mona Lisa was painted. From Wikipedia: > ... It had been believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506; however, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. Recent academic work suggests that it would not have been started before 1513. It was acquired by King Francis I of France ... So what we rely on here is custody records, all the way back to King Francis I. Also, why limit the discussion to modern copies? Again, from Wikipedia: > A version of Mona Lisa known as Mujer de mano de Leonardo Abince ("Leonardo da Vinci's handy-woman") held in Madrid's Museo del Prado was for centuries considered to be a work by Leonardo. However, since its restoration in 2012 it is considered to have been executed by one of Leonardo's pupils in his studio at the same time as Mona Lisa was being painted. Basically, it was a copy, painted at about the same time. Now imagine that King Francis I liked the Mona Lisa so much that he had one or more copies created. How would we know now which was the original? Only via records.

mirimir 8y ago

Yes, for the Mona Lisa, what's special is that Da Vinci painted it.

raattgift 8y ago
Quoting lisper (at the article on his website), 'All you have to do is to try to define what "the same thing" actually means.' (emphasis his). He is trying to define it in a way that the people who he is interacting with here don't agree with. It's a bit incongruous to point to an article that claims, "Arrangement is everything" (emphasis his), and then proceed to consider the arrangements of atoms in a painting without considering the arrangement of the painting with respect to other things, and especially not with respect to everything. At a chosen time coordinate, the painting and its replica (down to their subatomic constituents) occupy a non-overlapping range of coordinates in space. They are different because of the arrangement. Yet his argument is that they are the same because of arrangement (but only of the atomic components of each). More importantly, at a time coordinate in which Leonardo da Vinci was alive and the original Mona Lisa painting existed, there was only one such painting -- any atomically perfect duplicate comes much later, and it's that arrangement in time that is important in your arguments, which I agree with. More generally, otherwise-identical extended composite objects differ because the average of their components' worldtubes are essentially non-overlapping and diverge (or converge, depends on which way you want to think about timelike directions in this context) at different points in spacetime. In the case of our paintings the divergence happens at the tip of the paintbrush Leonardo da Vinci applied his completing stroke with, versus in the Star Trek style replicator. The value of these paintings are position-dependent, and history-dependent. Position and history (combined they are the worldline, or worldtube for extended objects) are degrees of freedom that does not vanish by physics tricks, although it is easy to neglect them when their effects are small, and neglecting them makes calculations much simpler. But the effect of position and history on the paintings' value is not small, or at least I think it would not be small for most assessors of value (although lisper claims he would value them equally).
- mirimir 8y ago
  > More generally, otherwise-identical extended composite objects differ because the average of their components' worldtubes are essentially non-overlapping and diverge (or converge, depends on which way you want to think about timelike directions in this context) at different points in spacetime. This is a great way to express the historical aspect in physics-speak. That is, the object isn't just a spacelike thing at some particular time. It's a spacetime thing. I can't quite imagine how one could duplicate that.