Tuesday 22 March 2011

Principles of relativity

1. Relative Motion
If you move in uniform motion relative to some surface and the surface is perfectly smooth, then you cannot make a physical experiment to find out whether you move or not.

2. Uniform Motion
If you do not have objects of reference, you cannot make a physical experiment to find out whether you move or not.

3. Special Relativity
If two events A and B take place so that A happens after the point in time necessary for light to reach from A one to B, but earlier than the point in time necessary for light to reach from B to A, then you cannot make a physical experiment to find out which event happened earlier and which later.

4. General Relativity
If you do not have objects of reference and experience inertial force, you cannot make a physical experiment to find out whether the force is caused by acceleration or gravitation.



These principles have so beautiful symmetry that it is difficult to imagine that they are not true. However the first one is obviously false because the surface must be made of atoms. Only in an imaginary universe where the matter can be continuous this principle holds. The second is the Galilean invariance. And the last two are Einstein’s.

Monday 14 March 2011

Memes war

Evolutionary principle of information propagation is universal. Starting from a simple hydrodynamic turbulence and stretching to more complex systems in chemistry, biology, genetics and politics, informational entities procreate as soon as new area suitable for existence is recognized.

In this sense biological organisms are not much different from turbulence vortices. When liquid changes its state from laminar to turbulent, there is a point of instability where an appearance of one vortex cause an avalanche process of recreating vortices first in the neighbor area and finally in the whole volume. One can say that a vortex wants to reproduce. Later they can fight for space killing each other and reproducing whenever possible.

Memes use people as an environment. When mutually exclusive memes clash and fight for survival the most effective solution is to eliminate the enemy meme habitat, i.e. a person who has an incompatible belief. Less severe measures are possible, but they are less effective. As long as people possess mutually exclusive memes, there will always be violence and wars.

Memes as any other evolving things do cooperate to fight common enemies. This cooperation assumes acceptance to some extent to foreign memes. Another acceptance can be to non-hostile or irrelevant memes.