Dear Friends,

I’ve been pondering a couple of perhaps related notions, poking round in their crooks and crannies, for the past few days. One is the seemingly farfetched idea proposed by a contemporary cosmologist and mathematician, Max Tegmark, that our Universe is made of numbers.

Now, nobody ever bumps into the numeral One or π when walking through the park, of course. But we do know that everything in nature, everything from the smallest scale to the greatest, everything from very basic physics to the most complex chemistry, even the the paths of individual fish in a school or children meandering in a gaggle across the schoolhouse playground can be described in algorithms composed of chains of numbers and mathematical notations. Four digits describe all of the genetic code in every life form we know of. Might the reason for these obvious and real facts be that the Universe is actually made of nothing but numbers?

Maybe.

So, where do numbers come from? It’s not like Pythagoras invented the numbers in his theorem. If he hadn’t come along, somebody else would have soon discovered the same mathematical expression for the theorem that became synonymous with his ancient moniker. Triangles would exist without he, Plato and Euclid ever pondering their perfect forms.

What else do we know in our Universe that is composed out of ethereal digits? Computer code, more or less rigorous math and logic, is one answer. Might all that we know be merely an elaborate string of code written by some extra-universal teenager frittering away a the billion-year nighttime while shrugging off his homework assignment for the next morning’s class in Cosmic Engineering and Applied Creation?

Maybe.

Like all computer code, of course, the one that might lie at the foundation of our perceived Universe, has bugs. Take Infinity, as an example. Math hates infinities. There are an infinite number of them, for one thing. Yes, that was a pun.

There is also the problem that physics has with infinities. Everything we might understand about what happens at the birth of our Universe is blown to smithereens by our best equations arriving at the numbers of Infinity. Likewise, we cannot use our mathematical tools to peer into the heart of a black hole, for therein lie infinities. Oh, and we get back to π! What is the deal with such a sublime number that perfectly describes what we observe but has no end? Sounds like a bug in the code to me.

What do you think?

Looking Forward and Beyond,

S

Alan Turing…

Dear Friends,

This cat basically invented what we now call computing. He had some help from a notable Lady, named Ada Lovelace and several other folks going back to the 1800s, but Alan Turing pretty well put the cherry on top of the sundae in the midst of WW2. In so doing he might have saved the world from Fascism. His payment for such cleverness and heroism was to be chemically castrated for the crime of making love with another man.

He committed suicide. He felt unrecognized and did not like the fact that he was growing breasts. He ate a bite of an apple laced with cyanide and went unrecognized for decades due to the secrecy attached to his pioneering work. He is a hero of mine. As my fingers fly over these keys to telecommunicate with you, I am thinking of the gentleman who laid the rails for our present digital railroad.

Oh, and he really liked stories like "Snow White". He was a sublime cryptographer. Might there have been a secret message in the half eaten apple left on his desk by his open books of notes?

Hic Finis Est,

SCS