[time-nuts] Most precise clock ever created - here we go again

Steve Rooke sar10538 at gmail.com
Sun Oct 31 06:52:33 UTC 2010


On 31 October 2010 09:20, Chuck Harris <cfharris at erols.com> wrote:
> Probably.
>
> I spent some time thinking about how I would build
> a humanity simulator, and some basic limitations came
> to mind.  First, I would have to follow the lead of a
> former girlfriend's mother when she said there are
> only 200 real people in the world.  By that she meant
> that everyone other than the "real" people were just
> atmosphere, and didn't exist to any depth... all legend,
> and no action.
>
> So, how would you do it without using order infinite
> complexity?
>
> Simple (haha!) take the simulated world's view from the
> perspective of a "real" person.  If he was inside of a
> small room, you would only need to simulate that which
> was in the room.  Everything in the outside world could
> be kept going as a story line.  As the "real" person
> moved through the world, his view of the world would have
> to be simulated at greater depth only if he could see
> it.  If he gazed out over the beach, the sand would only
> need to be there in the most superficial sense.  It would
> have to look like sand... It is only when he went onto
> the beach that the sand would have to have more substance.
> And, if he got ambitious, and pulled out a microscope,
> the sand would only then have to have individual granules,
> with bits of cruft, and life, within.

Wouldn't it be the case, though, that things inside the small room are
affected by things outside of it and hence a considerable amount of
processing would have to be undertaken to give a good simulation. Take
the example of watching a leaf move on a tree in the breeze, this is
not just affected by the molecules of air in it's vicinity but by the
complex interaction of land, sea, Earth, Moon, Sun, Planets, Universe
and the beating of the wings of a butterfly in Africa. It would depend
upon what realism of simulation you wished to offer to affect the
level of processing involved and this in turn would surely limit the
degree of close examination you were able to make. This would be like
a fine lithograph where some zooming is possible but any closer
examination is not possible as the underlying structure does not have
the necessary detail.

Steve

> This model of the world would greatly simplify the amount
> of processing time necessary to keep the 200 "real" people
> living their lives.
>
> How does this apply to time?  Well, time would similarly
> have to have a variable structure.  If one of our "real"
> people was daydreaming, time would slip by without even
> being marked.  If he was counting his heartbeats, time would
> become a little more precise, down to the second.  If he was
> watching the seconds tick off on two clocks, time would get
> more precise.  And if he was resonating a certain cesium
> line... well, you know.

By this, you are saying that time always has to have have the finest
detail possible because at any time a "real" person may be observing
it unless it works like the tree falling in the forest with no one
there so there is no need to make a sound. Also it would not really be
that the time was variable, the "real" persons would be subject to
that amount of time whether they were daydreaming or "resonating a
certain cesium line". it's only the amount of detail generated for
time that would be needed. We store all our life experiences in our
brains and it would be wasteful to allocate 50 fps of continuous video
of driving through the desert with nothing to see but the same rate
would be pushed to it's limits when we remember scenes like a plane
hitting a tall building.

> I would imagine, that it might really tick of the simulation
> master if one of the "real" people started doing something
> that required great quantities of atoms to need to have all
> of their subatomic particles simulated.

Indeed, and at what point does this become necessary.

Regards,
Steve

> Watch out Hadron super collider folks!
>
> -Chuck Harris
>
>
> shalimr9 at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>> So what you say is that access to what's below the Plank time is on a
>> "need-to-know" basis only, and we don't need to
>> know?
>>
>> Didier
>>
>> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>>
>> -----Original Message----- From: Chuck Harris<cfharris at erols.com> Sender:
>> time-nuts-bounces at febo.com Date: Fri, 29
>> Oct 2010 21:16:58 To: Discussion of precise time and frequency
>> measurement<time-nuts at febo.com> Reply-To: Discussion
>> of precise time and frequency measurement <time-nuts at febo.com> Subject:
>> Re: [time-nuts] Most precise clock ever
>> created - here we go again
>>
>> Bill Hawkins wrote:
>>>
>>> Well, I've always thought that the reason that there are quantum
>>> dimensions, like the Planck time, is because we
>>> are living in a very high-class computer simulation. There has to be
>>> granularity at some level.
>>
>> Only if you are looking at something.  If you aren't looking, the finer
>> precision levels don't need to exist.
>>
>> For instance, if you glance at the tree canopy out of an airplane window,
>> it only needs to be green shapeless blobs.
>>
>> There doesn't need to be anything living in the forest, only perhaps a
>> story line.
>>
>> But if you are standing on the forest floor, it needs to have branches,
>> bark, leaves and twigs... but not cells and
>> atoms.
>>
>> If you look under a microscope, what you are looking at needs cells.  If
>> it is a really good microscope, even tinier
>> stuff. Smashing it with a Hadron collider, quarks and other things...
>>
>> -Chuck Harris
>>
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-- 
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
- Einstein



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