12 ms·
The theory of relativity in words of four letters or less
- trebor 13y agoI found the article hard to read because of the word length. It created a strange, artificial rhythm to the text that drove me to distraction.
- haliax 13y agoThis is phenomenal, does anyone have sources of more physics concepts explained simply? Scott Aaronson's Quantum Physics is one: http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html
- darxius 13y agoI found that four letters added some ambiguity and some uneeded complexity. Maybe 5 or even 6 letters? Still, this is a great intro to relativity and it was a fun read. Also a cool literary feat.
- buo 13y agoAbout the cool literary feat: I'm wondering if there are languages other than English in which it'd be possible to write something like this. I speak Spanish and French and I'm sure it's impossible in both -- they just don't have enough short words.
- hkmurakami 13y agoProbably Chinese and Japanese since Chinese characters have such high information density, but non-Western languages might defeat the purpose of the experiment.
- dnautics 13y agoI find the fuzzing of proper names gets annoying, and it would be better if the rule were relaxed for proper names.
- shardling 13y agoAlso, a quick google serach indicates that "Ike" is a more common nickname than "Izzy". (And that if Newton had any nicknames in his time, none seem to have survived.)
- alexdowad 13y agoPersonally, I found the abbreviated names made the piece even more hilariously irreverent than it already was. "Izzy" for Isaac Newton? Makes him sound like an 1980's heavy metal star or something.
- shardling 13y ago>Say you woke up one day and your bed was gone. Your room, too. Gone. It's all gone. You wake up in an inky void. Not even a star. Okay, yes, it's a dumb idea, but just go with it. Now say you want to know if you move or not. Are you held fast in one spot? Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see that, sure. You don't need me to tell you. To move, you have to move to or away from ... well, from what? You'd have to say that you don't even get to use a word like "move" when you are the only body in that void. This is not as self-evident as the author believes. 1. Having taught a great many college level physics students, they have trouble grasping this. 2. More importantly, there's a reason people pursued the theory of the aether for so long -- you have to actually do the fucking experiments to show that there's no absolute reference frame you could be said to be moving in. Thinking that you can deduce physical facts about the universe a priori is the opposite of science. e: Suddenly remembered a Feynman bit from Lectures where he talks about exactly the attitude of treating this is somehow obvious: http://www.sciencechatforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=20750 http://www.sciencechatforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=207...
- Dylan16807 13y agoNot only is the point not-self-evident, the analogy is fundamentally flawed. You may not have an absolute speed but you can accelerate. If you really want a reference frame to compare to, you can use the one you started in before leaving. Edit: sorry, changed wording while being replied to
- Jun8 13y ago"Make things as simple as possible, but not any simpler" - Einstein. His own book from Dover is an excellent way to get started.
- jneal 13y agoThis is cool. I felt I had to keep my note the same. A very neat idea I'd say. Wish it was more easy to read. Very cool!
- 205guy 13y agoI see what you did here. I had the same idea, but you beat me to it.
- nlh 13y agoInteresting read and I like the concept, but I think the 4-letter rule added an arbitrary constraint that didn't necessarily make it easier to read or understand. If the idea was "explain relativity simply" then it could have been done better -- word complexity (ie "reading level") is a better measure than outright word length. If the idea was simply to see if it could be done with 4-letter words, well, mission accomplished :)
- breadbox 13y agoIt was in fact the latter. (I was inspired in part by Douglas Hofstadter, who did something similar on a smaller scale in "Le Ton Beau de Marot".)
- derekp7 13y agoSounds very similar to Guy Steel's "Growing a Language" talk. His constraint was to not use any word greater than one syllable unless it is defined by either one-syllable words, or other words that had been previously defined.
- dpritchett 13y agoThat really is a great talk! It's on Youtube too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
- daviddaviddavid 13y agoWow. I was sure this was inspired by George Boolos' great "Godel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable". http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Math/Milnikel/boolos-godel.pdf http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Math/Milnikel/boolos-godel.pdf I wonder if Hofstadter was inspired by Boolos?
- breadbox 13y agoActually, Hofstadter states that he was inspired by a magazine contest.
- biot 13y agoNow who can describe the theory of relativity in only four words? Similar to this: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html
- breadbox 13y agoEverything's relative except c. Best I could do.
- carlob 13y agoThis reminds me of 'Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4197284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4197284
- dpritchett 13y agoThe Up-Goer Five Text Editor is a pretty great resource with similar constraints: "Can you describe a topic using only the thousand most common English words?" The results in their Hall of Fame are fascinating. It's inspired by the xkcd linked elsewhere in this thread. http://splasho.com/upgoer5/halloffame.php http://splasho.com/upgoer5/halloffame.php
- wbhart 13y agoAge restricted as inappropriate by UK filters, presumably because it contains "four letter words". Great one O2. Nothing like restricting access by our kids to educational material.
- aendruk 13y agoIt may be qualifying "she's on her ass" as inappropriate.
- whatgoodisaroad 13y agoAm I being pedantic? That really should be four letters or fewer.
- pit 13y agoMaybe he means "The theory of relativity in words of four letters or less [than the theory of relativity]" -- i.e., it is an _incomplete_ explanation -- which some of the people on this page seem to agree with. Seriously, I thought this was extremely clever, and the short, clipped style reminds me of Hemingway or Mamet.
- breadbox 13y agoYes to both.
- 3minus1 13y agoYou don't always use "fewer" when talking about discrete units. For example, you say "less than 5 minutes ago". The same goes for measurements of length (less than 3 meters). I think "less" works here because letters is a measurement of length.
- boburhedRAGTOP 13y agoI know I'm dumb, but can someone explain this part? "Dana sees each rock at the same time, but Bert sees one rock and then sees the next rock." How would anyone's movement, or lack of it, affect their perception of whether the rocks landed at the same time or not?
- breadbox 13y agoYou're not dumb. It's a subtle point, otherwise special relativity wouldn't have been necessary to invent. (You may find it worthwhile to read a more normal article on special relativity -- it's much easier to understand than general relativity.) The two rocks land just as Bert and Dana are closest to each other. The two rocks are equally distant from that point. But as the light propagates towards them, Bert continues to move towards the light from the impact ahead of him, and away from the impact behind him. Thus he will see the light from the former impact before the latter. (The traditional thought experiment is described in terms of trains and lightning, instead of buses and moon rocks. If you do a web search for that plus "special relativity", you should find plenty of descriptions that are closer to the original.)
- gjm11 13y agoThe rays that come from each rock move only so fast. They take time to get from the rock to Dana or Bert. And it is only by when those rays get to Dana or Bert that they can say if they were at the same time, or one and then the next. Now. Bert is on the bus. It goes, let us say, from west to east on the road. Bert is half way from the west rock to the east rock when each rock hits land -- but he is on the move, and when the rays from the east rock hit his eyes he has gone some way east. The rays from the west rock have not yet got to him. Then, just a tad more time, and the rays from the west rock get to Bert's eyes. But Dana does not move. She sits by the road. The rays from the west rock and the east rock hit her at the same time: each rock is, say, a yard from her, one west and one east. So Dana sits and does not move; she sees the rays from each rock at the same time. Bert is on the bus, and goes from west to east; he sees the rays from the east rock and then the rays from the west rock. And all that is fine. They both know that Dana does not move and Bert does. So they will say that each rock hit at the same time, for Dana (who did not move) saw them hit at the same time. But (and this is the bit that may fry your mind) we can just as well say that Bert does not move and Dana does move! And then we will have to say that the east rock hit and then the west rock! How can that be? We must say, even if you find it odd, that "did the east rock hit, then the west? or the west, then the east? or both at once?" just goes one way for Dana and not that way for Bert. Just like "is this rock to the east or to the west?" may not go the same way for both, if they are not at the same site. (You are not dumb. This is hard. It took Al to work it out!)
- Avshalom 13y agoAs an explanation it's only mediocre, but it was a lovely poetic read. It felt on the verge of lyrical the entire time.
- elliptic 13y agoThere's an amusing though mean-spirited article of Paul Samuelson's purporting to debunk the use of the Kelly Criterion - [url]www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Courses/434F2005/Context/Kelly%20Resources/Samuelson1979.pdf[/url] (pdf). All the words are one syllable. I find the title rather poetic - "Why we should not make mean log of wealth big though years to act are long".
- GhotiFish 13y agoI made a word cloud of this I removed "and", "you", "the", "that", "a", and "to" as those were just a bit TOO big. http://i.imgur.com/77V6OvQ.png http://i.imgur.com/77V6OvQ.png
- Mz 13y agoReminds me of the story behind "The Cat in the Hat." "In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, William Ellsworth Spaulding, the director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin who later became its Chairman, compiled a list of 348 words he felt were important for first-graders to recognize and asked Geisel to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words. [33] Spaulding challenged Geisel to "bring back a book children can't put down." [34] Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. It retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Geisel's earlier works, but because of its simplified vocabulary, it could be read by beginning readers." From: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wfn 13y agoI've stumbled upon Brian's website before and have enjoyed many a writeup, including this one. I recall particularly enjoying `A Monovocalic Sonnet on Dante's "Inferno"` (http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/infirni.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/infirni.html) - the essence/joy being in the Notes section: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/infirni-notes.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/infirni-notes.html - it's so random and intense - a true hacker spirit I say :)
- maeon3 13y agoThis article is exactly what I needed, I've been trying to understand the unification of Gravity, Inertia and Centrifugal force for years now, couldn't fathom it, now I can. The best I can describe it is: "Matter is like water through a drain", I wrote a post with my consolation of how the three can be seen as one: http://sentientmachine.blogspot.com/2013/05/matter-is-like-water-through-drain.html http://sentientmachine.blogspot.com/2013/05/matter-is-like-w...
- jvdh 13y agoLooking at the page full of short words, the whole text just looks very weird, strange and sometimes just distracting. I never knew that I looked over the page so much as I was reading.
- pieguy 13y agoThere are many interesting pages on this site. The brainfk and Intercal resources are a fun read, also the tiny executables. The Tile World downloads are a bit out-of-date though.
- d0m 13y agoI'd prefer "The theory of relativity explained to four years old".. the "four letters or less", although funny, makes it harder to grasp IMHO.
- prawn 13y agoI wonder if something like this might be useful if added to Wikipedia's Simple English version of the Theory of Relativity page? That page seems a bit underdone right now. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity
- pjdorrell 13y agoAny one of us can work out x by x plus y by y plus z by z less c by t by t where x and y and z and t are each part of how to get from one "here and now" to a 2nd "here and now". I can try to tell you what c is or we can just say that it is one (i.e. c by t by t is just t by t). And the math that we do will work out the same if I work it out from what I see or if you work it out from what you see, even if I do not move at the same rate as you.
- Nilzor 13y agoWhy?