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Description Theory???

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whynaut

PostPosted: Tue Jun 05, 2007 10:19 am


In an article I read (I believe it was Discover Magazine, but I could be mistaken) there was a brief segment on something called Description Theory. Sadly, the article did not go into lengthy explanation, however, what it did provide peaked my interest.

What I was able to glean from the article was that Description Theory more or less describes the universe almost like binary code. At the most basic form of matter and energy there are only 2 states: existence and nonexistence. For a very very crude and inaccurate example, (where 1=existence and 0=nonexistence) 1100010110101 string of these fundamental particles together would represent something like a quark. So if one were to look at it from a somewhat philosophical standpoint, the universe we live in is little more than a hologram built up by this binary code. Or in other words, We may live in Windows but the universe runs on DOS.

So my questions are:

1) For those who actually know more about Description Theory, did I explain it right or am I completely off base?

2) Anyone know where I can find more information on the subject, because I personally can find next to bupkis online.

3) For those who don't know about Description Theory, does the above explanation even make any sense, or are there any logical or physical errors in the theory?
PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 11:38 pm


I'm not exactly sure how you can break up the heart of something, into being something or being nothing(or not being at all)

[Aeora]


whynaut

PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 1:11 am


[Aeora]
I'm not exactly sure how you can break up the heart of something, into being something or being nothing(or not being at all)


Not a hundred percent sure on that, but I think it makes reference to the theoretical "God particle" as the fundamental uniform particle of matter and energy. Hence, all things would be created out of 'god particles' except for the empty spaces in between 'god particles' which would be made out of nothing.
PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 2:27 pm


Pardon if I say something stupid. I only recently tried to return to my interest in science-related topics.

I tried to search on Google for "Description Theory" but the results were confusing. Do you know from the article who was the person that first discovered the new idea?

Not too sure about quarks, really. The very small amount of literature seems to say it is a random thing. So having it so black and white like 1 or 0 seems strange. Or is "random" something different and outside the topic?

Moo-ism


Storm Slayer

PostPosted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 10:04 pm


JuneeNoodle
Pardon if I say something stupid. I only recently tried to return to my interest in science-related topics.

I tried to search on Google for "Description Theory" but the results were confusing. Do you know from the article who was the person that first discovered the new idea?

Not too sure about quarks, really. The very small amount of literature seems to say it is a random thing. So having it so black and white like 1 or 0 seems strange. Or is "random" something different and outside the topic?

"Random" is just a word we use to describe something that we don't or can't predict. When you play billiards, you could say that there is something random about the movement of the balls; strangely, you can find countless simulations of the game using our physics.

Why can't we have just a 1 or a 0? It's all a computer uses, right? What you recognize as the word "chocolate" in my message is recognized by the computer as a bunch of 1's and 0's. What is it about it that makes it seem strange to you?
PostPosted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 1:21 pm


Well, it is 1 or 0 when you place a time on it for it to be 1 or 0. So one moment it is 1, but if you roll the dice again, it maybe 1 or 0. But why do you think I feel that is strange? Not sure what you are saying.

Also, isn't that a bit off topic?

I still want to know if there is a website to further tell me what sort of "Description Theory" the original threadmaker mentioned.

Moo-ism


The Zedd

PostPosted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 10:15 pm


Read this topic yesterday and didn't stop thinking about it the entire day, So I had a dream where everything in the world was made of zeros and ones. It was really wierd. I couldnt use the computer because the screen looked like this:

0100111010010101010101101010110
0110101001010101010010101010100
0101011010111010101010110011010
1100101011001010101010001010110
0100111010010101010101101010111
0110101001010101010010101010100
1101011010111010101010110011010
0100101011001010101010001010110
0110101001010101010010101010100
0101011010111010101010110011011
1100101011001010101010001010110
0100111010010101010101101010110
0110101001010101010010101010100
0101011010111010101010110011010
1010111101100010101010101110101
PostPosted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 10:25 am


You dont have to worry about that dream, if it start with 0, then everything else is meaningless.

About descriptive theory i found nothing...in wikipedia redface

I've seen related notation but never with 'descriptive' atatchment. And i dont think has something to do with descriptive geometry.

And lol living in a DOS inmersed universe will be full of bugs, some one will for sure make a Tesis called: Reality: Bugs and Patchs

Bijective


VorpalNeko
Captain

PostPosted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 2:20 pm


The only "description theory" I'm aware of has to do with the logic of proper names, rather than physics, so I don't know what the article is referring to. However, quantum states can be represented by qubits, so perhaps the universe is representable in "qubinary" (qubits allow superpositions of 0 and 1, unlike ordinary bits). Additionally, insistence the second law of thermodynamics applied to black holes suggests that their entropy (and thus their information content in qubits) is directly proportional to the area of their event horizons, and a related inequality applies to all physical systems (cf. Bekenstein bound). Also related to this are the conjectures of the holographic principle and the AdS/CFT correspondence of string theory.
PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2008 5:33 pm


I thought that catagory theory was as abstract as you could get ...

The closest thing that I found was Descriptive set Theory

No_Data_Mining

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