Timeline for Mathematics or gibberish? Understanding a description of an alien message in His Master's Voice
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Jun 18, 2020 at 8:28 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Jul 10, 2017 at 21:21 | answer | added | Rand al'Thor♦ | timeline score: 14 | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 20:50 | comment | added | user111 | Definitely not letter as in A, B, and C. But the nature of the letter is a complicated question that I don't really know the answer to. So if your answer depends on that information, I would recommend reading the book first. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 17:53 | comment | added | user111 | @JoshuaEngel thanks. I really hope I can get a good answer here. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 17:44 | comment | added | Joshua Engel | And he's hinting at a very realistic bit of mathematics: that there is some kind of symmetry in the text that could be discovered by varying the parameters. If you were to be given nothing more than the vertex locations of a dodecahedron, it might seem random, but the symmetries would clarify them. Still, you would expect to find similar symmetries in either a symphony or an English text. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 17:44 | comment | added | Joshua Engel | I'm not a mathematician, so I can only comment vaguely rather than answer. I can say that the process is not unrealistic, but it's more science than math: hypothesis, code, test. It's very realistic that he could find an existence proof without finding the object. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 14:39 | comment | added | user111 | I think it's plausible that, for example, this is an accurate description of the process of finding a proof, even if the actual proof itself has no meaning. Hence why I asked the first part of this question. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 8:09 | comment | added | user14111 | Lem has a reputation as a science fiction writer, not a mathematician. His Wikipedia page says he was trained in medicine. No reason to believe his fictional mathematics is anything other than the gibberish it seems to be. | |
| Jul 10, 2017 at 4:14 | history | asked | user111 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |