Freedom of Science

John Baez announces that Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: a Rosetta Stone is done. I don’t understand the category theory¹ details but I find the paper very inspirational.

On Section 1.4.2 Categories in Functional Programming authors consider the program (double) which doubles a number, so,

(double 4) = 8.

Double takes an integer and doubles it.² But

in reality, programming involves many other kinds of data. For example, suppose we are writing a program that also involves days of the week. It would not make sense to write (double Tuesday), because Tuesday is [a string] not a number.

This is an important observation that will cause a fundamental change in physics if physics could be brought to this elementary level of rigor.

In physics there is only one type of data, it is called whatever. A physicist will define any symbol locally as whatever data type that works at that point. Locally defined symbols are called puns.

• There is only one data type in physics: pun.

The authors emphasize that puns are not well-defined:

We might choose to represent Tuesday by a number in some program, but doubling that number doesn’t have a good interpretation: is the first day of the week Sunday or Monday? Is the week indexed from zero or one? These are arbitrary choices that affect the result, so the expression (double Tuesday) has no well-defined meaning.

This is true. But the current state of physics is absurd. Meaning has no meaning in physics. Because there is no error in physics.

Physics is legal. In legal puns enforced by authority of the practitioners are the only data type.

If pun is offensive to physicists then we might call the only data type in physics to be physic. Then physics is defined as a collection of physics.

Example: String is a string the way tuesday is a string. This is so because string by definition is a zero dimensional physic. By setting string to zero physicists effectively turned it into a string.

Therefore, a physicist is someone who can do mathematical operations on strings. In other words a physicist is a magician. A physicist will see nothing wrong with the program (double Tuesday).

Furthermore, a statement such as (General Relativity predicts) is as meaningless as (double tuesday). General Relativity is a string. It does not have predictive powers because (General Relativity) is nothing more than a placeholder.

• General Relativity is a rubric.

In order to become a science physics must establish elementary data types at least at the level used in computer science. And physicists will become scientists when they will be able to tell a string from a number. 

1. Nice intro to category theory. [↩]
2. Using the equality sign is confusing. In Arc (double) would look like this. This program also proves a claim I have been making here for a long time: Physics does not have errors. [↩]

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