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Infodumping - Blog Posts
Uhh I’m gonna use this as an excuse to infodump about graphs and fractals and how those two combined help me reason about everything from artistic composition to neural networks to psychology to neuroscience to quantum physics to distributed systems to astrophysics to etc etc etc. I’m calling this theory the:
Fractal theory of Everything
And I’ll probably post a lot of #looooonnnggggg posts about it under the tag “#fractal theory of everything” if you wanna adjust your filters accordingly. This is just the intro post to explain the theory. Actually using this theory to explain everything will be the posts which follow this one.
TLDR located here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DF9lYoQXZbebiIgB071Pv_lHiISCiocuSq-pbubD_xg/edit
Imagine everything as a bunch of nodes (cities, people, classrooms, photons, tumblr users, etc) connected by edges (roads, friendships, paths, quantum strings, followers, etc). This representation is called a graph and you might be familiar with it (looking at who follows me) from math and/or computer science.
This representation of a graph is useful because sometimes a large enough graph is self-similar at multiple scales, meaning when you look at like 100 nodes it looks about the same as when you look at 100k nodes. See percolation which shows why magnets stop working when they get too hot or too cold.
I argue that any graph with meaningful data (meaning not all noise and not all uniform) is an approximation of an n-dimensional fractal. As the graph approaches a more and more accurate approximation of a fractal the data becomes more and more meaningful.
Applied to explain the Double Slit Experiment (one of many applications of this model I've thought of so far)
If you assume that energy is finite (change in the momentum of objects over time) then you start to think about how the universe could possibly exist with its near endless complexity (see fractal graphs from above with their complexity).
My conclusion from energy being finite is that adding a new particle to the universe must scale at most linearly, otherwise adding more particles would make the universe quickly use way too much energy way too fast. Think about a universe where every particle collides to some small degree with every other particle. If you add one more particle to a 2 particle universe then you’ve added 2 more collision checks which is not so bad, right? However, if you add one more particle to a 100 particle universe then you’ve added 100 more particle checks. It becomes obvious that if energy is finite then this is a massive waste of energy for very little increase in scale of our universe. Since intelligent life which can reason about stuff like this can only exist in a sufficiently large universe, there’s a bit of a survivorship bias in that we must live within a universe which scales linearly at worst in order for us to be able to reason about all this, assuming energy is limited.
Since the universe must scale linearly, each particle can only “talk to” the top X most important particles around it for each “update frame” of the universe. (Time is weird though because the universe kind of slows down fast moving objects and my theory is that fast moving objects get more frames compared to slower moving objects but this is even more speculative and hazy than the rest of this infodump. There’s also some weird time shenanigans with looking back through time - see double slit experiment).
Having each particle only talk to their X most important neighbors means that the universe can scale linearly since every particle doesn’t have to talk to every other particle anymore (yay!).
However, limiting the number of edges each particle has also has ramifications in quantum behavior (behavior of particles on a quantum level or dealing with 1 to 100 particles rather than billions).
Basically when a particle only has a few other particles near it in spacetime it’s as though that particle has a weak GPS signal and the particle ends up moving in ways it shouldn’t because the particle only has a few friends to orient itself with. I theorize that the double slit behavior seen with a laser beam entering two slits is due to that particle having to guess where and when it is in spacetime based on the very few particles around it (see math theory of multilateration).
Therefore since the particle can't orient itself it has to guess where it is using probability and some sort of pseudorandom process. This creates the wave pattern seen in the double slit experiment.
honestly getting infodumped to is like. dreamy
there's nothing that melts me more than just hearing someone be passionate about something. And if someone has hurt you in the past and makes you reluctant to fuckin completely go off on the expanded canon of the X-Files or whatever, I'm gonna hit them in the head with a big mallet. You're adorable, show it. Please