"..a cosmologist who turned diaperologist for certain reasons."

January 7, 2008 12:37 AM

Max Tegmark has a funny website and some articles.
posted by sushiwiththejury (3 comments total)

From Dr. Tegmark's Poetry and Stories page:

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(October 17, 1991)

Good Morning.
Good night.
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Logout.
You have been discontinued.
posted by sushiwiththejury at 12:45 AM on January 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

How sad is it that when I saw the phrase "tragic death of Tycho Brahe" on his website I immediately thought of Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins -- and then realized that Tegmark was, of course, referring to the famous astronomer.
posted by sdodd at 7:25 AM on January 7, 2008

Neal Stephenson recommended Tegmark's "The Mathematical Universe" (the last of the links at the top) at SciFoo. I've read it twice, and I am still struggling to get to even a shallow understanding of what's going on. It feels like he's taking Godel's encoding scheme for mathematical propositions, and extending the idea to cover all physical phenomena, in order to show that it is possible to represent all fundamental physical behavior, and physical objects, as math without the baggage of words.

If you enjoy papers like this, I also recommend Cris Moore's "Predictability and Undecidability in Dynamical Systems'' (Physical Review Letters, Vol. 64, 1990, pp. 2354-2357) where he turns the halting problem into a physics problem, and if I recall correctly, shows from this novel viewpoint why knowing the entire state of a physical system is not enough to predict its future states with perfect accuracy.
posted by zippy at 9:46 AM on January 7, 2008