Hi Stephen,
> Can atoms exist in a 2D universe?
I remember having read that 17 sort of atoms can exist in some natural
2-dimensional QM.
I don't know if this is related to the anyons and Hall effects where
particles are squeezed in two dimensional trap (by powerful magnetic
field).
I have independent reason that the 2-dim topological space (and 2 + 1)
continuous deformation are quite important in fundamental physics. But
this has not yet been extracted from comp (to be sure).
> AFAIK, physics is very different when constrained to only 2D. My point
> is that the notion of computation is meaningless if there is no
> possibility of a stable structure on and in which to implement the
> computation.
This is false imo. A computation can be given a sense in pure
arithmetic (if only by Godel's arithmetization device).
If you postulate a physical universe at the start, you need to
postulate some ad-hoc highly non comp thesis to attach the first person
to it.
> Platonic Numbers or bit-strings have no ability to do anything by
> themselves (by definition!)
But numbers can do things by themselves relatively to other (universal)
numbers. That is what computer science is all about, I think.
> and thus appeals to their existence are vacuous.
?
Best regards,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Sat Nov 05 2005 - 09:11:03 PST