5 ms·

>I think that's a red herring. >I mean, isn't that just the marvel of abstraction? I can show you how it works, on a basic level: See, it goes around like this

>I think that's a red herring. >I mean, isn't that just the marvel of abstraction? I can show you how it works, on a basic level: See, it goes around like this. This connects here. That switch opens. This moves back, and that's the behavior that we're looking for. Easy. >Why is it that when that same thing happens a hundred times a second, the emergent behavior suddenly becomes mind-boggling? It's just the same thing, faster. I don't think it's a red herring at all. Going faster is more complex, more interesting. A spark plug ignites an air/fuel mixtures, it pushes a piston, which pushes a connecting rod, which turns a crank. That's easy -- once. At 3000 RPM that's 50 times a second, that's not easy, that's complex. It requires timing. I've hand packed fuel into a canister, ignited it, it goes boom, it moves metal. That's easy. But at 50 times a second it take precision. The spark timing from the distributor has to be right, the crank is connected via timing belt to the camshafts that control the opening and closing of the intake and exhaust valves. That timing has to be right. There's a computer constantly monitors the O2 content of the exhaust gases, so it can better control the air/fuel mixture. There's another sensor to listen for knocking caused by too little air, so it can retard the spark timing to compensate. All this happens 50 times a second. It's far more amazing than me lighting a fuse and watching something go boom.

Cushman 15y ago
But when you dilate time 50 times, isn't it still interesting? Aren't the precise parts still precise? It's more interesting fast because the material properties change, the speed of the springs and the motion of the flame front becomes important-- but that's still fascinating even when you can watch it happen. And you don't have to slow anything down to see that; controlled demolition, say, deals with the same sort of stuff on a large scale. When you're blowing up a building, what's happening in an individual explosive (hand packed fuel in a canister, with a dumb fuse...) too fast to see isn't important, but you need to pay close attention to the things that happen during seconds, perfectly human timeframes, because they become interesting and complex. Watching a single revolution of an engine in slow motion, you witness a marvel of engineering taking place before your eyes. But for decades (centuries?) before we understood them, people built engines by trial and error, and watching one of them in slow motion would not have been impressive. It would look sloppy, imprecise, unrefined. Engines today are amazing precisely because they are well understood very slowly, and in practice it mostly works to just say "and then that happens over and over again and that's what pushes you forward." That understanding is obvious on every scale, whether you're watching high-speed video or just hearing the engine note from outside. That's why I say that the interesting things are still interesting slowed down, and that "it's so fast!" is a red herring.

Cushman 15y ago

But when you dilate time 50 times, isn't it still interesting? Aren't the precise parts still precise? It's more interesting fast because the material properties change, the speed of the springs and the motion of the flame front becomes important-- but that's still fascinating even when you can watch it happen. And you don't have to slow anything down to see that; controlled demolition, say, deals with the same sort of stuff on a large scale. When you're blowing up a building, what's happening in an individual explosive (hand packed fuel in a canister, with a dumb fuse...) too fast to see isn't important, but you need to pay close attention to the things that happen during seconds, perfectly human timeframes, because they become interesting and complex. Watching a single revolution of an engine in slow motion, you witness a marvel of engineering taking place before your eyes. But for decades (centuries?) before we understood them, people built engines by trial and error, and watching one of them in slow motion would not have been impressive. It would look sloppy, imprecise, unrefined. Engines today are amazing precisely because they are well understood very slowly, and in practice it mostly works to just say "and then that happens over and over again and that's what pushes you forward." That understanding is obvious on every scale, whether you're watching high-speed video or just hearing the engine note from outside. That's why I say that the interesting things are still interesting slowed down, and that "it's so fast!" is a red herring.