6 ms·
Man, the universe is weird... Whoever created it was not a fan of the KISS principle.
by someplaceguy 3y ago
Man, the universe is weird... Whoever created it was not a fan of the KISS principle.
- combat-banana 3y agoIt’s very simple depending upon your context. (God’s object)
- rakoo 3y agoOr, they just set the speed of light as a #define and left the rest as undefined behaviour
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoPerhaps nit picky, and I know you were joking, but I think this is the wrong way to think about it. It's not that the other behavior is undefined, it's you essentially have all of these functions that use "C" in their definitions, and then you have "#define C ..." in a header file somewhere.
- ilyt 3y agoJust look at near any 30+ years long programming project and then extrapolate the growth of complexity and weirdness into billions of years
- wheelerof4te 3y agoSpaghetti code? Try "The Big Bang code".
- russdill 3y agoA limit to the speed of causality makes physics so much simpler. Without it you'd need to factor in the interaction of every particle with every other particle in the universe.
- someplaceguy 3y agoDon't you need to do that anyway, because of gravity? Wouldn't the causality speed limit just cause those gravity interactions to arrive with a time delay rather than being instantaneous? Which means that to simulate the universe you essentially have to keep a history of how gravity is propagating, which requires keeping more information than if interactions were instantaneous? In a sense perhaps this applies to light too, because since it has a finite velocity now you have to keep track of how all the photons individually propagate through spacetime, whereas if light traveled instantly this would not be necessary? EDIT: The advantage I see in a speed limit is that you should be able to compute what happens in a point of spacetime based only on the information that is around that point (which still might have come from any or all other particles in the universe, mind you). For me, this emphasizes how important locality must be and it basically converts the popular "spooky action at a distance" claims into nonsense to me. I guess that's why I'm a fan of the Many Worlds Interpretation.
- LadyCailin 3y agoTangential question: is the speed of causality coincidentally the same as the speed of light? Or are they the same because of some underlying principal that inherently links them?
- satvikpendem 3y agoCorrect, the speed of light is actually the speed of causality, we just so named it after light because that was what we first discovered as going at c, but many other things in the universe also due because it's the same underlying principle. That is why gravitational waves also travel at c, ie if you removed the sun instantaneously from the solar system, the Earth will continue to orbit for 8 minutes, as that is how long light (and the gravitational force) takes to get from the sun to the Earth.
- someplaceguy 3y agoI'm not a physicist, but AFAIU the speed of travel/causality for light is only the maximum speed of causality because photons have a mass of literally zero. If photons had non-zero mass they could only travel slower than the maximum speed of causality (which would probably be called speed of gravity rather than speed of light, in this alternative universe).
- nickpeterson 3y agoI think our senses are just imprecise and it undermines all our thoughts and perceptions of the universe when things approach limits.
- dredmorbius 3y agoOur senses are evolved to maximise our fitness function within our immediate reality. There's a view that our senses don't reflect truth so much as evolutionary fitness, which involves both compromises and biases.[1] Our evolutionary environment for the most part has excluded relativistic effects. Though that raises the interesting question of what sense perceptions of an organism evolving under such circumstances might be. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Donald Hoffman is the principle proponent of this that I'm aware of: <https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...>. I'm not entirely sold on the hard-line version of his argument; it seems to me that there's a general tendency for adherence to truth to be more parsimonious than outright fabulation, in which the nonessential inaccuracies of the sensing system incur additional costs.
- fallingknife 3y agoI have to disagree. The fundamental laws are quite simple. All the complexity arises from their interaction like in Conway's game of life.
- he0001 3y agoFrankly, it may very well be KISS because the other options were so much more complex. Or they said that if we put speed of light to constant to make it simple, there were so many unforeseen edge cases because of it. The devil is in the details, perhaps?
- potamic 3y agoYou haven't seen this other post today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197977
- lamontcg 3y agoThat should be "all of physics in 6 lines, two flawed overly simplistic arguments and one crackpot theory (and 18 particles and 27 constants buried in the last two items)". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733666
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoI actually think the opposite is true. The way I've heard it phrased and explained that makes the most sense to me is "everything moves through spacetime at the same rate" - it's basically the clock speed of the universe. It's just that if you move faster in a space dimension that your relative movement in the time dimension slows down. It only seems weird to us because our senses and minds evolved in an environment where things we can perceive never differ by relativistic speeds.
- someplaceguy 3y agoWhile I do like that intuitive explanation, it's lacking in describing all other aspects of the universe. Like, how the energy required for an object with mass to approximate the speed of light in spacial dimensions goes to infinity, even though it's already traveling at that speed through spacetime. Or quantum mechanics.
- DougMerritt 3y agoAlthough nothing will explain everything, still it's fine with the first point: increasing the rotation vector of momentum in spacetime increases mass. The rest follows, since you know that the more mass, the more energy required to accelerate still more. But if you are interested, a significant amount of the basics of quantum mechanics follow directly from Fourier transforms -- which unfortunately are harder to self-study than spacetime rotations.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoSure, one simple sentence is not going to explain the universe. But, at least from the simple relativity side of things, essentially everything falls out of (that is, it's a consequence of) that simple sentence. I.e. starting from that you can derive other consequences. E.g. "how the energy required for an object with mass to approximate the speed of light in spacial dimensions goes to infinity" is actually a direct consequence of that statement: every amount of energy you push into an object with mass causes it to accelerate, but due to the essential "clock speed of the universe", that acceleration is less and less as you approach the speed of light, and thus it takes an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light. Another way to think of it is that if it took anything less than an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light, then the speed of light couldn't be the universal speed limit, because you could add more energy that would accelerate it further. On the other hand, my understanding is that quantum mechanics is another beast entirely, and one of the biggest problems in physics, and to developing a "theory of everything", is to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity.
- lamontcg 3y agoNah, its real simple. SR just comes about because you want to keep chemistry working the same on a rocket doing 99% of the speed of light as it is at rest. Working out all the implications becomes very complex. But then you probably wouldn't have life to observe it if the simple rules didn't have complex emergent behaviors.
- ordu 3y agoI believe the opposite. It seems like a standard KISS artefact when abstractions leak from lower levels to upper.
- quickthrower2 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- anon291 3y agoRelativity makes it simpler actually.