[extropy-chat] Petals around the rose

[Alan Eliasen]

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   Ah, but you haven't learned all of the rules.  You *think* you always get
it right, but I hit an case early on (there were 5 1's) where the correct
answer was "Wrong!  There are [a blank] petals around the rose."  So you
thought you had it, and would probably enter a zero, (I didn't,) where the
correct answer was evidently to enter a blank.

   It reminds me of Richard Feynman's comment about trying to figure out the
rules of physics and how it was like trying to figure out the rules of chess
by watching static snapshots of a game in progress:

   "One way, that's kind of a fun analogy in trying to get some idea of what
we're doing in trying to understand nature, is to imagine that the gods are
playing some great game like chess, let's say, and you don't know the rules
of the game, but you're allowed to look at the board, at least from time to
time, in a little corner, perhaps, and from these observations you try to
figure out what the rules of the game are, what the rules of the pieces moving
are. You might discover after a bit, for example, that when there's only one
bishop around on the board that the bishop maintains its color. Later on you
might discover the law for the bishop as it moves on the diagonal which
would explain the law that you understood before -- that it maintained its
color -- and would be analogous to discovering one law and then later finding
a deeper understanding of it. Then things can happen, everything's
going well, you've got all the laws, it looks very good, and then all of a
sudden some strange phenomenon occurs in some corner, so you begin to
investigate that -- it's castling, something you didn't expect. We're always,
by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things
in which we don't understand the conclusions. After we've checked them enough,
we're okay."

   "The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting, the
part that doesn't go according to what you expected. Also, we could have
revolutions in physics: after you've noticed that the bishops maintain their
color and they go along the diagonal and so on for such a long time and
everybody knows that that's true, then you suddenly discover one day in some
chess game that the bishop doesn't maintain its color, it changes its color.
Only later do you discover a new possibility, that the bishop is captured and
that a pawn went all the way down to the queen's end to produce a new bishop--
that can happen but you didn't know it, and so it's very analogous
to the way our laws are: They sometimes look positive, they keep on working
and all of a sudden some little gimmick shows that they're wrong and then we
have to investigate the conditions under which this bishop change of color
happened and so forth, and gradually we learn the new rule that explains it
more deeply."

-- 
  Alan Eliasen                 | "You cannot reason a person out of a
  eliasen at mindspring.com       |  position he did not reason himself
  http://futureboy.homeip.net/ |  into in the first place."
                               |     --Jonathan Swift