Tim May wrote... "The last refuge of the scoundrel is to dismiss stuff as "secondary and tertiary sources," sort of like the fakers I used to meet in college who nattered on about having learned their physics from Newton's "Principia" instead of from secondary and tertiary sources." Oh, no...don't try to cram me into that category (or practically any other you can think of, for that matter). I'm a trained, degreed, published, and multi-patented physicsist. I regard as "Primary Sources" anything published in a fairly accepted journal or conference proceedings (though the latter can be hard to find, depending on the conference)....I might read a good review paper once in a while, but in the journals these are normally invited papers, and written by known people in the field they are summarizing. My admission of ignorance of that end of Von Neumann is precisely that: admission of ignorance due to not having read much ABOUT him, and having only read his more famous papers. As for a universal nano generator, that notion has seemed a little too science-fictiony for my tastes, though in the optical world some of my colleagues were developing some fairly amazing optical lab-benches on a chip, but these are more at the micron scale. You'll pardon my scepticism about a universal generator being a useful notion any time in the near future...the recently defunct Optical Micro Machines (OMM) couldn't even get a micron-scale 3-D optical cross connect to work reliably (nor could anyone else, including Lucent, MEMS-R-US, or hosts of others), so that nano-scale generator is at least decades away, if it will ever be possible. -TD

From: Tim May <timcmay@got.net> To: cypherpunks@lne.com Subject: Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2004 19:09:27 -0800

I'll comment on the sociology after commenting on the physics:

(actually, looking over your sociology, I see it's just more of the liberal whine and sleaze, so I won't bother commenting on it again)

On Jan 1, 2004, at 6:34 PM, Tyler Durden wrote:

...

Tim May wrote...

...

Then your education in physics about von Neumann is sorely lacking. Von Neumann spend part of several years investigating self-replicating machines, using some ideas of Ulam and others. Well-covered in the cellular automata literature.

As you can probably tell, I've never read many secondary or tertiary sources. (ie, as a physicist I've always considered it of dubious usefulness to read ABOUT physics...) I've only read the few more famous von Neumann journal articles I've come across w.r.t. cellular automata...I actually thought he had only written two or three, and I don't remember his ideas of self-replicating machines as including something like a GA, but then again it's easily possible I didn't pick up on the ramifications of what I was reading (which is granted when I was much younger).

The last refuge of the scoundrel is to dismiss stuff as "secondary and tertiary sources," sort of like the fakers I used to meet in college who nattered on about having learned their physics from Newton's "Principia" instead of from secondary and tertiary sources.

I encountered von Neumann's work on self-replicating machines when I was in high school (*). It came up in connection with the Fermi paradox and in issues of life (this was before the term "artificial life" was au courant...I was at the first A-LIFE Conference in '87...von Neumann couldn't make it).

(* And no, I don't know mean my high school teachers taught us about von Neumann machines. 97% of the science I knew by the time I graduated from high school I'd learned on my own, from the usual "secondary and tertiary sources.")

A few moments of thought will show the connection between replicators and general assemblers. A general assembler can make another general assembler, hence all general assemblers are replicators. And in fact this is necessary to make mechanosynthesis nanotech viable, as otherwise it takes all the multibillion dollar wafer fabs in the world, if they could make nanoscale things, to make some scum on the bottom of a test tube. GAs only start to become possible after the replication problem has been solved (which it has not, despite claims about self-reproducing software structures and train sets and the like).

If you are not aware of basic developments, recall Wittgenstein's maxim: "Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent."

...

--Tim May "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -- Nietzsche

_________________________________________________________________ Take advantage of our limited-time introductory offer for dial-up Internet access. http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup