Re: discrete physics, a network approach
- From: "robert bristow-johnson" <rbj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 19:09:55 +0000 (UTC)
alfansome wrote:
> You may want to familiarize yourself with the works of Ed Friedkin and
> Stephen Wolfram who have been looking at cellular automata (discrete
> elements) as a sort of "first principle" in constructing a cosmological
> model.
i think that Ed had recently started a USENET newsgroup,
sci.physics.discrete and i once ventured there:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.discrete/browse_frm/thread/2071e1b8654e71dc/0240e737a3d2dcf9#0240e737a3d2dcf9
to ask what might the "sampling frequency" of Nature be? i was
thinking (and still do, sorta) that the Planck time (or something very
close, i would multiply G by 4*pi to get these "natural units") might
be a logical unit of discrete time for nature. however Ed didn't think
so at all. i'm not the expert, he is, so i'm not challenging it, but
if Maxwell's, Shrodinger's, and Einstein's field eqs. were expressed in
terms of these natural units, the anthropocentric scaling factors: c,
h_bar, epsilon_0, and 4*pi*G are gone. if those differential equations
are simply broken up into discrete difference equations (using Euler's
method), you basically have simple rules for cellular automata where
the cell size (in one dimension) is about a Planck length (about 3
times bigger: sqrt(hbar*4*pi*G/c^3)).
and in these discrete-time, discrete-space equations, there are *no*
extraneous scaling factors. you don't have to come up with some lame
explanation for why nature takes this electrostatic flux density and
has to scale it with some arbitrary constant (1/epsilon_0) to become an
electrostatic field strength.
i certainly don't propose that a discrete nature is reality, but it
just seems to me that *if* nature were discrete, these natural units
(nearly Planck units) would play an important role.
that's my pet theory. (the hardcore physicists here yawn.)
r b-j
.
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