Bill Jefferys wrote:
>
> At 9:19 AM +0100 3/27/02, Juergen Schmidhuber wrote:
> >You are claiming the AP necessarily implies a specific fact about
> >nuclear energy levels? I greatly doubt that - can you give a proof?
>
> Yes, I can.
>
> http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1954ApJS....1..121H&db_key=AST&high=06070
>
> This is the classic paper where Hoyle shows this. It has been cited
> repeatedly in the literature on the AP as an example of a genuine
> prediction of the AP. For example, Barrow and Tipler cite it in their
> book.
Being sceptical about proof by citation, I failed to find such a
mathematical proof in this paper. Its predictions are based on
approximations and assumptions (the authors do acknowlege this)
besides the AP. Where exactly do you think is the proof?
Predictions that later turn out to be correct demonstrate predictive
power of the sum of all assumptions, not of AP by itself.
> I don't care about flying rabbits. Stick to the issue at hand.
This was the issue in the original message.
At the risk of beating a dead horse: plain AP does not exclude
continuations of your world with different physical laws, as long as
your self survives. Who knows - maybe you could live on in a crude
simulation that completes ignores the concept of energy levels.
To make nontrivial predictions you clearly need more than the AP.
The theory of inductive inference provides what is missing:
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html
Juergen
Received on Thu Mar 28 2002 - 01:21:40 PST