Re: Measurement & Precision

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From: Crunchy Frog
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1992 17:15

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In article <1992Nov2.043143.24298@augean.eleceng.adelaide.edu.AU> 
  dabbott@augean.eleceng.adelaide.edu.AU (Derek Abbott) writes:
>Imagine you are a stone age philosopher. All you have are your big chunky
>stone tools to work with to engineer with for everyday life.
>
>You produce a persuasive argument that it is impossible to ever produce
>tools, machines and measurements that are accurate to within micrometers
>(or fractions of a camel's hair).

It is always a mistake to say that something is now and forever
technologically impossible.  Eventually you will be proven wrong.  This
is (I presume) what the caveman is doing.  Not having seen his/her argument
I can't tell.  The thing with QM and related topics is that now we are
finding things that are fundamentally impossible.  Getting out of the
Earth's atmosphere is just a matter of building a big enough engine.
Getting beyond the speed of light has very different limitations.

C Frog

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Newsgroups: talk.philospohy.misc,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.physics,sci.skeptic
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU!Xenon.Stanford.EDU!amorgan
From: amorgan@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Crunchy Frog)
Subject: Re: Measurement & Precision
Message-ID: <1992Nov2.171519.14550@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU>
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Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University.
References: <1992Nov2.043143.24298@augean.eleceng.adelaide.edu.AU>
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1992 17:15:19 GMT
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