3 ms·
The device works just by following/‘reading’ the pre-cut Lorentz-encoding grooves cut into the base of the device. There’s nothing computational going on in the
by qubex 8y ago
The device works just by following/‘reading’ the pre-cut Lorentz-encoding grooves cut into the base of the device. There’s nothing computational going on in the grid of mechanisms. Replace the base with non-hyperbolic grooves and you’d get non-relativistic transformations. It just follows the template encoded for it.
- roywiggins 8y agoThere's nothing computational going on in an ordinary globe either, but it also encodes a kind of rotation in its physical arrangement. I think this is part of the point: that it's not much more complicated than an ordinary rotation.
- db48x 8y agoNo one ever claimed it was a general-purpose computer. Like all special-purpose computers, it performs a specific computation when used.
- qubex 8y agoThat’s actually a fascinating point because I both in one sense am not denying the device’s generality whilst in another sense indeed defending it’s generality: it might be said that I’m actually saying it’s general because you can run those grids upon virtually any engraved backplane while at the same time since reading off the backplane is all the device does I’d be arguing it isn’t general at all. This is the mechanical analogue computer equivalent of a digital discrete computer’s bi-dimensional lookup table.