ca314159 (ca314159@bestweb.net)
Sat, 20 Nov 1999 08:33:31 -0800
Dear all,
It is very difficult for me to be optimistic when
I think of human nature under the duress of that great
conceptual revolution that we are all approaching.
Like the artist Rockwell who portrayed not what we are, but
what we would like to be, it seems in some way virtuous
to try and propagate that optimism in the same manner:
This movie is about a little idyllic town cast in black,
white and gray. When these contented inhabits are
introduced to color, it spreads like disease and chaos
ensues. The movie is none-the-less optimistic in that
things can change drastically and that we will cope.
http://pleasantville.cannery.com/
Many people's economic livelyhoods are usually built on the
idea of "controlling both sides of the equation"; that
is, the problem becomes its own solution. People put
up with inferior models because it provides them with
funding while they _slowly_ fix the "problems".
Computer programmers do this, blue collar workers do this
and marketing executives do this,...
Dilbert poked fun at this when he declared that marketing
execs don't like to get into anticipation wars with their
competitor's marketing execs, so instead of doing anything
'new', they just do the same thing over and over. This is
a collusion between corporate marketing divisions that
gives them 'time'. A 'whistle blower' will disrupt this
falsity and create competition resulting in volatility.
Art is quite different. In art the idea is to be 'new',
and at some level unanticipated. Shock-art is one extreme
and realist art minimizes what is 'new' but never really
eliminates it. To be able to 'predict' art goes against its
grain.
The science in the art, is that we don't bother physically
reproducing the same old thing over and over once we can
predict it, instead we create a symbol for it as a compressed
form of subjective representation. That is an economy of
representation in terms of communications, and forms much
of the basis of physics and applied mathematics. Understanding
physics in terms of communications theory unravels alot of its
theoretical 'flaws', though many of these flaws appear to be
intentional.
In article <383c4ff5.2544368@news.tel.hr>,
miro.prpic@sk.tel.hr (Miro) wrote:
>
> A bit of hard-headedness frequently invigorates:
> http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/vjs.html
>
That is indeed a very interesting paper within the
scope of physics. I've wondered myself whether
particles could bounce off the vaccuum due to an
impedance mismatch and whether mass itself is definable
in this manner. In resonant electric circuits, the
inductor is usually mechanically modelled as a mass
while capacitance is modelled analogously as a spring.
When one includes the ideas of impedance the mechanical
analogs become very interesting.
At the moment I tend to think analogously, of particles travelling
backward in time as being similar to those little
spring cars that you push _backward_ on the floor
to wind up the spring _backwards_, it will come back
to you with negative momentum and procede past the
equilibrium point of the spring to wind the spring in
the other direction; without too much friction, the car would
oscillate back and forth for a while like a clock.
It also seems easier to get an idea of virtual particles,
by studying the Boson (massless particles like light)
equivalent of virtual images made of 'virtual' photons
in holography. Virtual images are the backwards version
of real images.
Remember in olden days when the sun circled the earth
and when they plotted out the orbits of the planets
they ran into these things called epicycles and retrogrades
wherein the planets zigzagged across the virtual sky ?
Here's a picture of Copernicus and retrograde:
http://www.goodnet.com/~karink/astronomytees/gfx/ms-coper.gif
A new mental 'basis' was found where these 'effects'
just didn't happen. It had nothing much to do with
physics because either way you looked at it you were
looking at the same thing, it was largely a subjective
leap forward which simplified matters mathematically.
I think here of virtual particles travelling backward in time.
--
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