I just started reading Tom Siegfried\u2019s \u201cThe Bit and The Pendulum\u201d recently, and unlike most books, this one starts off with a big idea. A really good idea. That idea is as follows: since the dawn of science, way back in the 1500\u2019s or so, our scientists have tended to use practical mechanical items as a metaphor for understanding what they are studying. And what they are studying is the world. Individual scientists usually don\u2019t study the world as a whole; they pick a particular subject, e.g. rocks or heat or chemicals or stars or butterflies, etc. But they usually need a \u201cmeta-theory\u201d of reality to fit their discoveries and immediate theories into. It\u2019s that meta-theory that Siegfried says usually comes from observing an important practical tool. <\/p>\n
Siegfried cites clocks as having a lot of influence upon Isaac Newton\u2019s physics. The operation of a clock hints at the orderly direction and use of force. Newton found the math to express what the clock seemed to be doing (the fact that a clock needs numbers certainly didn\u2019t hurt Newton in his determination that math was needed to describe what was going on). A hundred or so years after Newton, the steam engine probably influenced scientists, especially in the field of thermodynamics. The steam engine helped them to abstract Newton\u2019s ideas regarding force into the somewhat more abstract concept of energy. Siegfried then jumps to the present, with computers as a metaphor for information. And thus you now see a lot of speculation about information as the ultimate grounding of reality and the universe as one big computer. Siegfried\u2019s book talks about this, but you can find others. E.g., Seth Lloyd\u2019s \u201cProgramming the Universe\u201d. <\/p>\n
Siegfried has bigger fish to fry in his book, but I think this is a really interesting idea. He doesn\u2019t develop too many other examples of abstract theories stemming from practical machinery, although he does leave behind one good one: the science that led to the computer was conceptualized in the early 20th century around the typewriter! <\/p>\n
So what else can we do with this idea? How about Einstein? What machines helped to shape his ground-breaking concepts regarding the unity of space, time, mass, gravity and energy? I would venture to say that the railroad train played a big role (the train being a further development of the steam engine). How about quantum theory in the early 20th century? I\u2019m out on a limb here, but perhaps the revolutionary concept that energy and matter come in irreducible \u201cquanta\u201d was helped along by the many factories and production lines of the time, which cranked out thousands and millions of standardized products, all of the same size and shape. As to the random, dancing behavior of quantum particles, perhaps the scientific realization that the micro world behaved so strangely was assisted by the area of industrial statistics and quality control, which dealt with the fact that industrial production lines actually were not perfect; their behaviors and outputs were subject to random factors that were describable (on a higher level) by Bell curves. <\/p>\n
And if you go way back to the days before science, you can still see human technology at work in the metaphysician\u2019s attempt to make sense of the universe. For example, the ship figures largely in some ancient descriptions of how our world relates to other worlds, such as heaven and hell. Go back to Genesis and Adam and Eve \u2013 the writer there may have been thinking about another human artifact, i.e. the farm, specifically the orchard. The universe is a big farm where crops and trees are arranged by plots. Don\u2019t cross over to that particular plot at harvest time, or something bad\u2019s gonna happen. <\/p>\n
I always enjoy a big, simple and new idea, especially if helps you to focus things a bit. I think Siegfried has a good one here, so I\u2019m happy to share it today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just started reading Tom Siegfried\u2019s \u201cThe Bit and The Pendulum\u201d recently, and unlike most books, this one starts off with a big idea. A really good idea. That idea is as follows: since the dawn of science, way back in the 1500\u2019s or so, our scientists have tended to use practical mechanical items as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5251,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions\/5251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}