If you put chalk under a powerful microscope
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And my god, it’s full of stars. There’s endless detail in the universe, whether you zoom in, or zoom out.
See: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/NASA-HS2...
Our ability to track distinct objects is impressive by our own standard, and we're pretty good at understanding "big" numbers, say somewhere between a million and a billion. But in the scale of things, we're much closer to the hunter knowing his kill will feed his tribe for many moons versus being a starfaring race.
The entire universe probably contains around 10^80 protons, yet Google's founders casually referred to the number 10^100 to indicate their ambitions for information processing.
A carbon atom is 0.3 nm in diameter, so only about 3.3 million can fit in 1 mm. There are well over twice the number of people in NYC!
All in all, numbers that describe the natural world aren't all that impressive compared to the human world.
The entire visible universe that is. It could well be infinite and hence contain a larger number of them.
We can only see the light that has had time to reach us. Everything that is farther away than about a dozen billion lightyears is not visible.
Technically new stuff is always becoming visible to use, the visible universe expands naturally as new light reaches us.
Of course, the stuff is now farther away since the universe is expanding and at some point the expansion will likely overtake the speed of light and over some distance may have, which means beyond some distance we will never be able to see or know.
What is beyond the visible universe is quite unknown. We can't see it.
But you're comparing mere cardinality with combinations and permutations. We know the latter always produces huge numbers.
Sure, but about 70 quintillion of them fit in 1 mm^3.
When we stop and think about it, maybe. But try this experiment with a friend (or a few times with different friends): take a sheet of A4 or "letter" sized paper and a pencil, turn it in landscape orientation and mark the far left side of it with '0', and the far right side as '1B' telling them it's an even scale from zero to one billion, and ask them "without thinking about it just mark where a million would be." -- it's important to get a response from "the top of their head" to understand the difference between what we can recall, and what we habitually think. Most people are way off. If paper isn't handy use fingers and a large object you can touch - e.g. top edge of monitor or TV etc.
It would take light nearly 2.5hrs to travel that far.
I mean look at the black and white 2x4, top one 2nd from the left, my mind instantly just wanted to plot that in Matlab and gaze at how complex the equation is!
[1] https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1022890070531960837?s=...
In contrast, something like a box of gears or related machinery parts, which theoretically is also full of edges, doesn't provoke the same feeling...
E.g. starting with the DNA:
Deep dream also made me feel calm, like I was watching a natural process, like a plant growing, or the rain falling. I hadn't had that kind of reaction to "computer" art before.
(Edit: Don’t understand the downvotes. Don’t understand a lot of downvotes lately. Do I have a target on my back?)
You're getting downvotes because you're advocating something that makes entirely 0 sense from a usability perspective. And commenting on why you're being voted in a particular way is wholly against the guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
And clearly the existing limitation is a pain in the ass, or else services that "unroll" multi-tweet text wouldn't exist. The limitation is completely arbitrary and clearly not entirely helpful, so a request to lift it is entirely reasonable.
Well, if you can compose multiple Twitter messages into a long one, the limitation is kind of just half there.
Each having a low limit, or one having a low limit makes for specific conversation dynamics.
Long form, or free form is a different thing.
Equating them is over simplifying both the request and dynamics in play.
This discussion reminds me of when Instagram stopped enforcing that all pictures be square, a (mostly) ideological limit that made using the service harder.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/...
[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-opens-floodgates-on-28...
PS: I can't tell, because I have no idea what people see in Twitter in the first place.
For example, massive salt diapirs (think of them as giant, mountain sized fingers) 5-15 miles beneath the earth's surface are gradually squeezed, like a fluid, moving upwards and fracturing rock (and chalk) above, creating porosity and permeability necessary for oil production.
> It has been observed, again, that the abundance of Globigerinae, in proportion to other organisms, of like kind, increases with the depth of the sea; and that deep-water Globigerinae are larger than those which live in shallower parts of the sea; and such facts negative the supposition that these organisms have been swept by currents from the shallows into the deeps of the Atlantic.
> It therefore seems to be hardly doubtful that these wonderful creatures live and die at the depths in which they are found.
> However, the important points for us are, that the living Globigerinae are exclusively marine animals, the skeletons of which abound at the bottom of deep seas; and that there is not a shadow of reason for believing that the habits of the Globigerinae of the chalk differed from those of the existing species. But if this be true, there is no escaping the conclusion that the chalk itself is the dried mud of an ancient deep sea.
> Only tangentially relevant, but I love the fact that sand from Normandy still consists of up to 4% microscopic war materiel from WWII.
Exactly, yes:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e4af/e51dd7946512eb14674035...
edit: It's very hard for people to admit we really don't know, is what I am trying to say. I mean that's the real definition of chance, we don't know for certain. Whereas, if there is more to the field theories, more than ether, I'd really like to know, but I'm not holding my breath. Between measurement uncertainty and observer uncertainty, the models will remain just that.
Removing the Beamsplitter (BSA) would only remove the ability to correlate the measurements, so how do you know that there are actually no instances of Gaussian distribution happening already at the origin, which would cause the fork at the splitter (instead of information traveling back in time, for example)?
> observation, experiment and theory
we agree on the observation and theory parts. The predictive power of the theory for experiments is duly noted, but here the object under scrutiny is way bigger than a single atom. Whereas the science around the materials used, crystallography to begin with, is way above my grade.
The language in the paper caused me a bit of trouble: "It is easy to see ...", "at the same time", "a quantum".
And then the simulation only has to be detailed enough to provide you with a reasonably-plausible answer. As soon as you stop looking, the algorithm can just strip out the detail.
This trick isn't even that hard, graphics processors do it all the time.