h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don´t think they mentioned it in the movie. But in the book they used the polarisation of the light to transmit the information. So it probably wasn´t just using two states.

jokes are cool, but i meant technology and maths and science. well, they are all good!

As I said before, modern modems (56k ones) use four state transmission systems. The trouble with binary is that it is very easy for people like us to get confused with all the ones and zeroes. The population of the UK is approximately 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in binary. It's very easy to lose track of the number of zeroes. In decimal, this number is much more compact: 64,000,000.

Contact?
The movie with -yuk- Jodie Foster? I never read the book, but I hated the movie : I must have thought at least five times : "oh, this must be the end of the story" and every time it just wasn't... And all the sentimental stuff involved, really... I did like the machinery, though!

About the binary system and transmission of information : I think in the -near?- future other systems will be used, with more states, in order to increase speed, maybe by using fundamental physical properties of nanoparticles and things like that, but a lot of research will have to be done to come to a solution like that. But it's hard to predict how long research takes, since you cannot accurately predict the bottlenecks, you don't know if there will be enough money available in the future (govenments and big companies have to be sufficiently interested in the research), and you can't predict the human factor either (how much scientists will be willing to work on it? Sometimes one genius can give the research an impulse that otherwise would take years to reach this point...)

anyway, this is not really connected to the discussion anymore, I'd better shut up!

what we need for the jump (or what was called genius by honey^3) is a Paradigm Shift! for more, search philohophy of science, Thomas Kuhn. I am Kuhnian!and that is not an alien civilisation. maybe i should put my philosophy of science essays online, but too bad, it got destroyed in a hard disk crash......

Paradigm shifts doesn´t exist.

and how did you,xanatic come to that conclusion?

Well, there´s just not that many of them. Imagine when people suddenly found out the Earth was round and not flat. People still acted as if it was flat. You still claimed a straight line was a straight line. Or when Einstein showed Newton wrong. Scientists didn´t suddenly forget all about Newton, and went on to Einsteinian thinking. It is only in few circumstances you have to take Einstein into account. You can most of the time ignore him.

Not with on-off signals (how would you know what the interval was? Like would "---______" be "100" or "111000000"?) but with pulses seperated by pauses to indicate prime numbers, ("- -- --- -----") and then an analog video signal copying the format they recieved from an Earth signal.

Oops, that last reply was to post 20.

Well, some systems will use the following encoding for sending binary symbols down the wires. If we say _ is low voltage and - is higher voltage, they represent 0 as _- and 1 as -_, so a sequence like 01110 would be _--_-_-__-. In this case, you can figure out the interval by the voltage changes, so it's not a case where if your timing is off, you'll lose a bunch of 1s or 0s in a row. Basically, we indicate the value not by the voltage level, but by the direction of the change (low->high, high->low). Does this make sense?

I'm sorry, Xanatic, but I really don't consider Newton's theory 'wrong'... The only thing you can say about it for sure is that it is correct within certain approximations, given the kind of measurements that could be performed in his time. It is still one of the most valuable theories that exist, notwithstanding the 'errors' that occur when one would use it in extreme ranges of parameters.
All in all, as long as there is not a unified theory, any one of the existing and frequently used theories (like Maxwell's electromagnetisme, Einsteins' Relativity, ...) can and most likely will be 'wrong' in certain points, since they don't fit together.

But I guess this discussion also belongs in a different area!

Well, I meant wrong in the sense that it doesn´t work on those few cases. But since we usually don´t encounter them, we just go on using the Newtonian world view. Which is why there never really happened a paradigm shift when Einstein came about either.

well here's an example for you. think aristotle and then galileo and copernicus. perfect heavenly bodies to imperfect. tada

What?