CSICON -- Murray's Law -- Eternal Exponential Expansion of Science:
Rich Murray 1997.04.05, 2001.06.22, 2011.01.03
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2011/01/cs ... ntial.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/message/102


Rich Murray CSICON April 5 1997
Communion for the Subjective Investigation of Claims of the Normal
Room For All
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April 5, 1997

Murray's Law -- Eternal Exponential Expansion of Science

Millenia of worldwide commonsense traditions have culminated in a
recent few centuries of exponential scientific work.
Since 1660, the number of scientists has grown from about 100 to about
10,000,000.*
Likewise, the volume of accumulated scientific literature, both
doubling unstopably every twenty years, rather like Mickey Mouse's
hordes of relentlessly marching brooms in Disney's "The Sorcerer's
Apprentice".

This global orchestration of thought and practice has been firmly
founded on certain principles, rarely questioned, widely held to be
unquestionable.

Experience, available only in the ever changing present moment of
personal subjective awareness, is held to be entirely based on and
derived from a basic reality, itself "external" to experience:
physical, or more abstractly, time-space-energy.

This base reality is universally assumed to be impersonal,
consistent, orderly, lawful, causal, uniform, single, measurable,
describable, communicable, continuous, contiguous, inherently simple,
and based on a small set of unchangeable (in themselves)
logical-mathematical operations.

Therefore this reality can be modeled and predicted by the
self-qualifying global society of scientists, based solely on
communication with perceivable symbols via the external senses.

In short, the primary reality (along with its barely acknowledged
orphan, conscious experience) is absolutely normal.

The primary image of this paradigm is that of the machine, or the
modern embodiment, the computer:
well-defined elements interacting in three-dimensional space along a
single one-way track of causality to produce utterly normal results,
however marvelous, varied, valuable, or unpredictable they may be in practice.

This towering edifice of established normality paradoxically
both hides and makes even more significant any hints of "nonnormality"
-- the illicit paranormal, the lurking transcendentals, from ghosts
with the most to Lord of Hosts.

Hitherto, "anomalies", such as random variations in offspring, the
fogging of sealed photographic plates by uranium ore, or slight static
in sensitive radios, have become mere fodder for the assimilation
program of science, leading to vast extensions of the range of the
normal, including evolution, quantum mechanics, and the Big Bang.

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated"-- the implacable
marching motto of the Borg juggarnaut.

Willem of Occam proclaimed, "Thou shalt not multiply entities
needlessly."

Indeed, hordes of angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, influences, and
innate qualities have been relegated to the dustbins of our race's
mythic heritage, from children's Saturday morning cartoons to
incessant massively multiplayer video games for tens of millions.

Mature minds, entranced by ever more lofty and subtle theoretical
visions, fed feasts of observation and experimentation on every level,
constrained by principles of parsimony, generality, and elegance, have
exuburantly, soberly created in a mere century:

at the ever tapering tail of the dragon, atoms that are .999999 empty space,

said empty space as a fully occupied negative energy sea of prodigious
density, with incessant particle pair production-annihilation within
that good old vacuum,

the equivalence of mass and energy,

the relativistic variation of observed time, with irreducible
randomness, fuzziness, discontinuity, and, feh!, nonlocality at the
very core of reality,

the weird phenomena of superconductivity and superfluidity,

the ever fecund boson-fermion zoo of baryons, mesons, quarks, gluons,
neutrinos, WIMPs, gravitons, Higg's, magnetic monopoles, and their
antis, and their superpartners, all cascading into actuality as
infinitesimal loops or membranes vibrating within that most spacious
crystal of abstraction, E8XE8 Group (The Monster) Symmetry, while now
7 additional dimensions of space are parsimoniously mandated.
Whew!

meanwhile, at the ever bigger end of said dragon, suddenly the
galaxy!, sprinkled with pulsars and quasars,
oh!, then an expanding universe of galaxies, salted with gamma-ray bursters,
all swimming in huge rivers and pools and dollops of dark matter, with
a ubiquitous profoundly mysterious dark energy inexorably increasing
cosmic acceleration in the recent five billion years,
oh!, that all sprang into being as a space-time bubble with zero total
energy as an infinitesimal quantum vacuum fluctuation in "something",
oh!, our bubble of galaxies extends 10E+25 further than the 13.7
billion light years presently observable (that's 10E+75 greater
volume, folks),
oh!, might be untold zillions of universe bubbles, forever
disconnected, each with unique intrinsic properties, effervescing
cheerily within "something"...

just the facts, Mamm, heh, heh.

Funny what the principle of parsimony leads to...

gee whiz, I near forgot, black holes, them's weird nuff, huh? Lot of
'em, too, all sizes!
Oops, they evaporate!
Blow up too!
Wow!
Gravitational radiation, anyone?
We can plain see gravitational lensing!
How about cosmic string and cosmic texture, frozen phase changes in
space-time itself?

remember, if it ain't prohibited, it mandatory.
Yep!
(Is anything really prohibited?)

I'm not complaining.
It's surely wonderful.
We taxpayers are getting our money's worth, and then some.

But do you see any sign of convergence?
Any saturation?
Any deceleration?

In empirical fact, isn't what we see in a mere hundred years an
unstoppably exponential avalanche of proliferation of fantastic
subtleties?

Isn't the most obvious outcome for the next century a continuation of
this inexhaustibly creative weaving of this coat of many colors,
worlds within worlds, without end, without any possible end, not in a
hundred billion years of sentient evolution, not ever, forever?

Isn't this, ahem, trend, amen, the primary observational fact of the
last hundred years?

I say so.

I hereby dignify this empirical law by a suitable appellation:

Murrray's Law:

In the overall exponential evolution of the scientific process, the
scale of reality available for consideration and the diversity and
subtlety of its entities and interactions all increase exponentially,
forever.

In 1660, the linear grid of Cartesian coordinates comprised the
primary paradigm for scientific reality.
On its empty black and white board Newton drew alike the falling
apple, the orbiting Moon -- simple balls coasting smoothly along
well-defined paths in perfect space.

Now the archetypal image is the Mandlebrot Set, full of brilliantly
and arbitrarily colored subtle details, forever inexhaustible in
timeless simultaneous single entire creative fractal hyperinfinity.

*Actually, according to AAAS, there were 5.8 million science and
engineering researchers in 2006. [ now marvelously interlinked via the
global Net ]
**********************************************************

RichMurray wrote:But do you see any sign of convergence?
Any saturation?
Any deceleration?

Yes, because there is surely only a finite amount of stuff to discover, at least if we are talking about stuff that is sufficiently general to count as science (of course there is no limit to the number of raw facts about the world we could catalog if we could be bothered). Employing more and more scientists shows that it is becoming much harder to discover new things and so each significant new discovery requires much more labour. And it could be argued that the pace of fundamental discoveries is slowing in spite of the explosion of scientific activity. For example I think it is generally accepted that there were more important discoveries in fundamental physics in the first half of the twentieth century than in the latter half.

In fact I'd say this slowing down in discovery isn't confined to the sciences. With the end of "modernism", art seems to have reached a kind of end. Mostly it now recycles old ideas and just tries to do something slightly novel with them.

Thank you Chrisw, for your reasonable consideration.

I often, as an informal hobby, note all the surprises about C, carbon, the sequence of facts, definitions, paradigms, since I first watched matches and kerosene lattern wicks turn into charcoal in our rented farmhouse in the pines of Fannett, east Texas, NE of Galveston, from July 1941-- summer, 1945: coal, pencil "lead", diamond, graphite, carbohydrate plants and foods, carbon dioxide, smoke, oil, gasoline, greese, Vaseline, hydrocarbons, the endless pantheon of organic chemistry, benzine ring, DNA, RNA, proteins, exhalation, carbon monoxide toxicity, alcohol in all its permutations as drink and drug, rocket exhaust specific impulse, V-2 rocket, nuclear structure, isotopes, C-14 dating, C-13 for biological studies, pure isotopes, C-14 from hydrogen bomb tests causing worldwide cancers, high pressure studies to ever higher densities for every decade to find and use carbon allotropes, odd and even nuclear parity in C nuclei isotopes, C nuclei beams, methane microwave maser and then CO2 infrared lasers, interstellar and intergalactic C, C deep in the core of Earth and large planets, a carbon nuclear resonance vital to the carbon nuclear energy cycle in the Sun, carbon via the Big Bang, carbon gases essential to allow the first H and He clouds to cool down by infrared radiation from their quantum molecular vibrations and rotations and so allowing the first stars, solar systems, supernovae, and black holes, leading to at least one planet warm enough with the CO2 solar heat retention process to have oceans and carbon polymers evolving into the appearance in awareness in your and my awareness-being as these very little black and white le t t e r marks quickly cognized as subtle and complex meaning conveying patterns of subjectively experienced ever evolving understandings including the possibility and eventual personal experience of unexpected higher dimensional phases of conscious awareness -- while in our daily dream, buckyballs of all kinds, spheres, rods, ovoids, the last ten years carbon nanotubes incredibly strong and light, longer and longer until we have the Space Elevator, and now 2D graphene in all its permutations for physics, a host of quantum effects, simulation of cosmological theories, ultra capable molecular scale quantum computers with photons in carbon nanotubes (not electrons in wires) or quantum spin devices in 3D crystal volumes, superconducting at room temperature, extending Moore's Law for many more decades, with all the exponential ramifications for humans suddenly moving in mile scale high altitude solar powered air ships, big as ocean liners, spiraling safely and gently with electric ion drives to orbit within a week, then extending the ellipse of the orbit to orbit the Moon, Mars, the entire volume around the Sun, creating solar system size telescope arrays, harvesting asteroids for water, metals, and, yes, carbon -- and this is merely what one age 69 geek is capable of saying on 2012.06.06, online since December 1995 -- note that cosmology now necessitates 10 space dimensions and 1 "time" dimension -- while basic concepts about causality, space, time, energy, mass are being derived from more primitive and fundamental comprehensions, like Smolin's Loop Quantum Gravity and a variety of others, while now it's, ha-ha, possible that the metauniverse is infinitely fractal in all possible patterns of basic physics, "carbons", dimensions of spaces and times, life forms, and modes of awareness-being,
which is here this very mo m e n t.. . . . . .

And, since January, 1999, I've been a layman volunteer information activist on the Net, providing 1,650 long, detailed, civil, conscientious reviews of aspartame toxicity, aspartameNM@yahoogroups.com , which turns out to be the toxicity of its 11% methanol (smallest organic carbon molecule), which is turned, in humans only, into formaldehyde by the ADH1 enzyme right inside the cells of many tissues, starting many diseases from Alzheimer's to multiple sclerosis, later cancers, and birth defects spina bifida, autism, and Asperger's.

within mutual service, Rich

Chrisw wrote:

RichMurray wrote:But do you see any sign of convergence?
Any saturation?
Any deceleration?

Yes, because there is surely only a finite amount of stuff to discover, at least if we are talking about stuff that is sufficiently general to count as science (of course there is no limit to the number of raw facts about the world we could catalog if we could be bothered). Employing more and more scientists shows that it is becoming much harder to discover new things and so each significant new discovery requires much more labour. And it could be argued that the pace of fundamental discoveries is slowing in spite of the explosion of scientific activity. For example I think it is generally accepted that there were more important discoveries in fundamental physics in the first half of the twentieth century than in the latter half.

In fact I'd say this slowing down in discovery isn't confined to the sciences. With the end of "modernism", art seems to have reached a kind of end. Mostly it now recycles old ideas and just tries to do something slightly novel with them.

Are you channelling Lord Kelvin ?

There is a near infinite amount of stuff to discover not only from what has happened in the past before we evolved but what we can make that nature never could make.

In time though there will be fewer scientists simply because science will be done by machines.

byofrcs wrote:There is a near infinite amount of stuff to discover not only from what has happened in the past before we evolved but what we can make that nature never could make.

As I said there is practically an infinite amount of raw facts about the world. But science is a lot more than the cataloguing of facts, human curiosity has its limits - I don't really want to fund a massive research project to count all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. Science is about discovering interesting regularities about the world, the more general they are the more "interesting" they are to us.

Think of the world as an incredibly complex mass of patterns and think of science as a search for data compression algorithms to describe it more compactly. That could be a project that never ends for the simple reason that we have no way of knowing that there is nothing more to be discovered. But it seems likely that the major discoveries (the low hanging fruit) will come early on followed by progressively harder to discover theories with progressively less payoff. At the very least there seems no guarantee that the reverse will be the case, that we'll keep discovering more and more amazing things at a quicker and quicker rate. That would require a pretty strange universe.

RichMurray wrote:Thank you Chrisw, for your reasonable consideration.

I often, as an informal hobby, note all the surprises about C, carbon, the sequence of facts, definitions, paradigms, since I first watched matches and kerosene lattern wicks turn into charcoal in our rented farmhouse in the pines of Fannett, east Texas, NE of Galveston, from July 1941-- summer, 1945: coal, pencil "lead", diamond, graphite, carbohydrate plants and foods, carbon dioxide, smoke, oil, gasoline, greese, Vaseline, hydrocarbons, the endless pantheon of organic chemistry, benzine ring, DNA, RNA, proteins, exhalation, carbon monoxide toxicity, alcohol in all its permutations as drink and drug, rocket exhaust specific impulse, V-2 rocket, nuclear structure, isotopes, C-14 dating, C-13 for biological studies, pure isotopes, C-14 from hydrogen bomb tests causing worldwide cancers, high pressure studies to ever higher densities for every decade to find and use carbon allotropes, odd and even nuclear parity in C nuclei isotopes, C nuclei beams, methane microwave maser and then CO2 infrared lasers, interstellar and intergalactic C, C deep in the core of Earth and large planets, a carbon nuclear resonance vital to the carbon nuclear energy cycle in the Sun, carbon via the Big Bang, carbon gases essential to allow the first H and He clouds to cool down by infrared radiation from their quantum molecular vibrations and rotations and so allowing the first stars, solar systems, supernovae, and black holes, leading to at least one planet warm enough with the CO2 solar heat retention process to have oceans and carbon polymers evolving into the appearance in awareness in your and my awareness-being as these very little black and white le t t e r marks quickly cognized as subtle and complex meaning conveying patterns of subjectively experienced ever evolving understandings including the possibility and eventual personal experience of unexpected higher dimensional phases of conscious awareness -- while in our daily dream, buckyballs of all kinds, spheres, rods, ovoids, the last ten years carbon nanotubes incredibly strong and light, longer and longer until we have the Space Elevator, and now 2D graphene in all its permutations for physics, a host of quantum effects, simulation of cosmological theories, ultra capable molecular scale quantum computers with photons in carbon nanotubes (not electrons in wires) or quantum spin devices in 3D crystal volumes, superconducting at room temperature, extending Moore's Law for many more decades, with all the exponential ramifications for humans suddenly moving in mile scale high altitude solar powered air ships, big as ocean liners, spiraling safely and gently with electric ion drives to orbit within a week, then extending the ellipse of the orbit to orbit the Moon, Mars, the entire volume around the Sun, creating solar system size telescope arrays, harvesting asteroids for water, metals, and, yes, carbon -- and this is merely what one age 69 geek is capable of saying on 2012.06.06, online since December 1995 -- note that cosmology now necessitates 10 space dimensions and 1 "time" dimension -- while basic concepts about causality, space, time, energy, mass are being derived from more primitive and fundamental comprehensions, like Smolin's Loop Quantum Gravity and a variety of others, while now it's, ha-ha, possible that the metauniverse is infinitely fractal in all possible patterns of basic physics, "carbons", dimensions of spaces and times, life forms, and modes of awareness-being,
which is here this very mo m e n t.. . . . . .

And, since January, 1999, I've been a layman volunteer information activist on the Net, providing 1,650 long, detailed, civil, conscientious reviews of aspartame toxicity, aspartameNM@[color=#CC0000][b]yahoogroups.com[/b][/color] , which turns out to be the toxicity of its 11% methanol (smallest organic carbon molecule), which is turned, in humans only, into formaldehyde by the ADH1 enzyme right inside the cells of many tissues, starting many diseases from Alzheimer's to multiple sclerosis, later cancers, and birth defects spina bifida, autism, and Asperger's.

within mutual service, Rich

Take your ridiculous aspartame spam somewhere else, thanks.

RichMurray wrote:
Murrray's Law:

In the overall exponential evolution of the scientific process, the
scale of reality available for consideration and the diversity and
subtlety of its entities and interactions all increase exponentially,
forever.

This is very improbable, isn't it?