How does the universe decide what’s going to happen next? Basically it’s running a massively parallel, real-time, infinite-precision numerical simulation.
Category Archives: Universe Doesn’t Think Like Us
The Three-Body Problem
With two interacting bodies, interacting via the r-squared forces of gravity or electricity, and obeying classical mechanics, the equation of motion can be written down in closed form.
With three interacting bodies, the equation of motion can’t be written down in closed form.
So the three-body problem can’t be solved exactly (and this is just for classical mechanics and r-squared forces). Algebraic approximations or numerical simulations can do a good job, but they’re not exact.
So what’s it mean?
The Universe Doesn’t Think Like We Do
The Universe doesn’t care. Really what I mean is…
How the universe operates and how we understand and analyze it are entirely different.
The universe…
- doesn’t define or categorize things, like mammals vs reptiles, or life vs non-life
- doesn’t calculate things, like quantum mechanics or relativity or three-body problems
- can’t be divided into holistic vs reductionistic situations, or matter vs space
Holism vs Reductionism
Reductionism reduces everything to its parts. You know how the parts behave, then put them together, and thus you know how the whole thing behaves.
This could be for our knowledge in principle, for our knowledge in practice, and for how the universe does it (except the universe doesn’t, we just think it does).
Reductionism has been exceptionally successful in the last thousand years or so, first with the Arabs and then with the Europeans and their descendants.
Life
DEFINITION
A living object is material in an ordered state, which actively maintains its state (at least), and (better yet) is able to rearrange increasing amounts of its environment into something similar to itself, by growth (ok) or replication (best of all).
In detail, it’s an object that is…
- significantly more ordered than its environment (maybe not its immediate environment, as a bacterium living inside an animal, but its broader environment, like the environment that animal lives in), and
- actively maintains its ordered state (when its order is disrupted, energy is involved in (attempting to) return to its previous state), and
- is able to make more of itself or something very similar to itself.
Very Universe 