🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov8.231641.28334@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> pratt@Sunburn.Stanford.EDU (Vaughan R. Pratt) writes:
>
>You are forgetting that scalability is a big concern today in CS.
>Digital models don't scale gracefully, the bits look bigger.  Smooth
>scalability demands a smooth view of what one is scaling.  A digital
>view inhibits scalability.
>

Can you give an example of where scalability becomes a problem? Of course
things don't look the same on smaller and smaller scales, but that's the
whole point. If you take a smooth rod of metal, you can keep chopping it
in half, but eventually you'll run up against a barrier of individual atoms -
your scalability disappears.

I think the notion that continuums exist is based upon our naive physical
intuitions about the smoothness of things in the real world. At the back of
our minds is the idea that that continues down to the microscopic scale. We
now know that this is not the case.  Working with digital computers allows 
us to form new physical intuitions about the structure of the world, ones 
that (to me) make more sense.

Smoothness is ingrained very deep in physicists view of the world. It
amazed me to read Feynman discussing a model of an electron as a smooth
ball of charge (not to mention "point" charge) with all the mental problems
that provokes of imagining the "stuff" of which an electron exists and chopping
it in half etc.

A digital view of the world neatly gets rid of all these problems. The only
thing left to do is invent the new physics. :)

Dave Griffiths