Re: "analog computer" = useless hypothesis?

From: Jim Fehlinger (fehlinger@home.com)
Date: Wed Apr 04 2001 - 18:54:15 MDT


Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>
> I believe this question may have first been inspired by a series of essays in
> The Edge, from last month. Physicist Free Dyson wondered whether life had to
> be digital or analog?

Yes, the point of origin seems to have been:
http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians/1783.html

> One of the respondents was cosmologist Lee Smolin, who said:
>
> "At worst life will be able to survive by coding itself into the quantum geometry
> of space itself."

Now where have I seen **this** before? Ah, yes:

"But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their
ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in
the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts
for eternity in frozen lattices of light."

-- Clarke's _2001_ (Chapter 37, "Experiment")

Jim F.



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