Re: Tolerable "unscience"

On 2005-12-12, Andy Shepard <andy+usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In <1134344632.051767.87450@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Allen Thomson <thomsona@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Andy Shepard wrote:
>>
>>> The things I have the hardest time with are messing around with mathematics
>>> or with things which derive directly from mathematics without much dependence
>>> on the underlying physics of the universe, like computer science. The
>>> 'message in pi' in _Contact_ was probably just about the worst loss of WSoD
>>> I ever had.
>>
>> I could of course be mistaken, but my reading of the reason Sagan
>> inserted the message into pi was precisely that, somehow, an
>> enormouslytranscendentsuperentity had messed with fundamental,
>> has-to-be-true-everywhere-no-matter-what mathematics. It was just
>> impossible, but it was also true. So, to borrow a Banks-ism, it was
>> an "out of context event."
>
> Sagan describes *computing* pi to find the message, not measuring it [1].
> The value of pi thus obtained is entirely internal to a particular formal
> system, not a property of the physical universe,

That's exactly what he was saying.

> and is not available to be tampered with, no matter how omnipotent you are.

You must have a different definition of omnipotent than the one I'm
familiar with.

Of course, one could say something about setting things up so that
certain formal systems are much more useful, and these ones do contain
constant that have embedded messages.

--
Aaron Denney
-><-
.

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