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

Here's something more in line with the big coincidences stuff: The next prime after 1000999998997996995994993 that is the concatenation of 8 numbers starting with a power of ten and proceeding by decrements is 7777 digits (The 972nd of the type).

Cor; photography is easier.

I thought I would do some rambling; not the walking variety but of the gibberish sort.

I was watching a program on BBC2 about infinity intended for a general audience. With a mathematical head on infinity is just a collection of numbers or objects unless it is defined otherwise, but nevertheless some effort was gone into about real world implications which are to say the least bazaar.

A monkey problem or hypothesis was illustrated where if a monkey could live forever and typed random letters eventually it would write the complete works of Shakespeare, but surely it would also write every work that has been written and even every work yet to be written given long enough, and it sure has the time.

Now this might be a difficult concept, one in which my diminished brain power can't cope with and I seem to have made an assumption about time or that the universe will last forever and consequently we as a race will exist forever.

The Big Bang Theory gives a starting point before which there was nothing and we are the result of asymmetry; a spontaneous violation of symmetry, but if we were not and there was no starting point in another universe somewhere there is a computer that has been working away randomly forever and has written all our life stories. Our lives become mapped out or pre-ordained by the existence of infinity.

We know infinity exists in the abstract so the question is does it exist in reality, is the universe infinite because if it is then there is a computer working away somewhere but just hasn't had time yet to find the answer to everything.

It was suggested that the universe is really 4-dimensional and if you travel in a straight line for long enough you get back to where you started; I don't know if it is but if it were the the night sky would eventually look the same down under as it does above my head.

This is all bazaar stuff and I'm uncomfortable with a real infinity but would rather think of infinity as a largest distance, a fixed magnitude no magnitude is greater than.

If time dilates, and say every next unit of time doubles in length relative to you then you can never reach this fixed distance, or is this nonsense because I'm not great with physics or time.

Right; back to normal now.

I don't really know where to start on that.

Here's the smallest prime that starts with a power of ten and is a concatenation of increasing numbers in sequence:

10000000000000100000000000011000000000000210000000000003100000000000041000000000000510000000000006100000000000071000000000000810000000000009

It's bigger than 17 primes that start with a power of ten and proceed by decrements instead of increments. I'm trying to figure out how best to write a computer program to get the number like 17 for arbitrary base.

got anything good on the ultimate prime???????

1

pick a base....any base

are there decimal place primes and do they work the same as whole number primes????

2.0

I amused myself with some nonsense or is it about infinity; in fact if infinity exists every possible reality would be typed by the monkey; lucky monkey. Must be a bit like a data entry job to do that for infinity.

But we still need somebody to read it and mathematics is an evolving language, things become possible with better symbolism or at least clearer so the monkey possibly couldn't do it at all.

But I did see a program where a computer intelligently controlled a virtual world; so maybe not a monkey but just a computer will write everything but it might get stuck on a problem and not know when to stop.

So maybe infinitely many computers, well they could all get stuck but what if there are as many computers as there are real numbers.

Don't know.

Its the BBC's fault for making me think of all this. Got to have a cuppa

Taff: 1 is only prime in certain bad definitions. No mathematician considers 1 to be prime. It's not the opposite of prime, which is 'composite', either. It's a 'unit'. If you consider different sets of numbers than the whole numbers--normally different 'rings', but the whole numbers aren't a ring (For that, you have to include 0 and the negative integers)--the units in a ring are the numbers that have a multiplicative inverse, the primes are the numbers that have no factors that aren't units and associates of themselves, associates being a unit times themselves, and the composites are everything else except 0, which is just 0.

PAL: I'm pretty well convinced that we live in a programmed world in which a lot of our story was written ahead of time, with still plenty of room for us to screw things up on our own (for ourselves, not for the program). It's not an original idea, but it depends upon a fine-tuned control of 'nature'--at least to a fair degree--in my version of it (In the version I'm aware of having been thought of before, we literally live in a simulation, while I just think of the program and mini-robotics for it existing in the real world we perceive).

I got that program I was trying to write done. Not a sign that any other base comes close to base ten in the particular characteristic in question, but I had a long wait for base 61 and I'm having a much longer one for base 67 (The longer the wait, the more likely it is to be more extreme than base ten (though base 61 didn't even come close)).

thought of before, we literally live in a simulation

I am all the time. I'm an ideas person, come up with one then gets rubbished.

But that is right; because without ideas where would we be. I only dismantle an idea if it is completely rubbished, and I'm still not sure with infinity we are not barking up the wrong tree, barking mad.

A long time ago I came to the conclusion that mathematics is a creation of mankind. Maybe it is all wrong.

You can't swore here; You can't express yourself. I am frustrated

Strange; when you look at stuff you apparently did and don't recognise it.

Memory is like that. Always too much going on to keep track of or even recognize what you'd think would be very familiar.

>> A long time ago I came to the conclusion that mathematics is a creation of mankind. Maybe it is all wrong <<

Me too!
Yes, numbers and maths and all their intricate relationships
exist only in our minds. Numbers, as such, do not exist outside
our imagined comprehension of them. It's all a result of our
pattern recognition abilities. Those abilities are how our ancestors
used to 'know' when it was time to see if the bears had emerged
from their caves or if the birds had laid their eggs.

Experience and the ability to see patterns in experience would lead
us (perhaps inevitably) to create a counting system and eventually to
look for more patterns in the numbers.

But like all of mankind's attempts to explain creation and existence
it's all just a metaphor, an analogy, a set of imagined explanations
for what we perceive and project on our actual observed universe.


~jwf~

Mathematics is no less nor more real than language.

Well with finitely many letters and a few rules of grammar it is much more limited. In mathematics notation develops.

Animals can make noises that possibly mean something to them, but I think they will have problems with Differential Geometry or Universal Algebra.

So maybe mathematics is more abstract than language.

Mathematics is the language in which abstract things are dealt with precisely. It is a language itself, and therefore can't be more or less something than language is.

if you like numbers and letters try the battleships thread

Started reading this thread with the intention of posting about the nature of supernatural and what the word means. Oops! Now that my eyes are blurry and I have admitted to myself that serious maths makes me sweat, can we please go back to the question that was asked? Supernatural is a strange word for things which we as humans (albeit with big brains) don't understand.I do appreciate that there are many conundrums to be found within our lives. I do need to ask a question though. Is the reason that we keep seeking the answers a symptom? Or is everything ordered through some kind of scientific experiment?
If this is true, can you blame people for losing the will to live?
Predeterminism seems to indicate that our lives are mapped out. I personally believe that the choices we make are down to us at the time. Regrets are all down to bad choices or not enough information. Since we have the options then we should make the most of them and not rely on scary maths or dead Grandfathers to make the choices for us.
I will qualify that by saying that it is an opinion and everyone is welcome to disagree. (Or agree if you want to, the choice is there.) I am not going to get offended by people disagreeing with me because that is what makes the world go round. And incidentally, if I could focus, I would probably disagree with a lot of people too!