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Article #325Re: Infinity and its consequences
From: Mr. Gordon L. Nelson
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 00:00
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1998 00:00
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You really ought to read "One, Two, Three, Infinity" by George Gamow. He is the originator of the "Monkey at the typewriter" parable. You take a monkey, totally ignorant of the English language, and put him at a typewriter (or better, a computer). Let him type away at random. Eventually he will produce all of the plays of William Shakespeare, all of the great books ever written, as well as all of the books and papers ever published on scientific matters. Of course,as Gamow points out, you will have a horrendous editing problem because 99.99% of what the monkey writes will be gibberish. Sifting through the mountain of gibberish to extract the really good stuff would be simply overhwhelming. Anyway, that's my spin on the significance of the infinite and the vanishingly small probability that some very unlikely event will occur. G. Nelson
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X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f4cf3,1c0aa0a2047e55fe X-Google-Attributes: gidf4cf3,public From: JTSW06A@prodigy.com (Mr. Gordon L. Nelson) Subject: Re: Infinity and its consequences Date: 1998/08/23 Message-ID: <6rodre$e0vq$1@newssvr04-int.news.prodigy.com> X-Deja-AN: 383833458 Distribution: world References: <6qvh00$lv0$1@phys-ma.sol.co.uk> <35d46b02.f498c0f6@direct.ca> X-Auth-User: 000000000/932bf98c773d8ce6 X-Post-Time: 23 Aug 1998 06:46:06 GMT Organization: Prodigy Services Company 1-800-PRODIGY X-Problems-To: abuse@prodigy.net Newsgroups: cu.physics.ugrads