Joshua

Metatron is not spouting psuedoscience hogwash. Metatron is simply not good at communicating his ideas to others (no offense). If you know a bit about chaos theory then you've probably heard of attractors. Attractors are three dimensional graphs of chaotic information. The information (say, a sporadicly beating heart) only APPEARS to be completey chaotic. Once it is mapped on three axis, point by point (heartbeat by heartbeat), a shape emerges. This shape describes the limit or boundries of the chaos. Perhaps the most famous is the Lorenz attractor: http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/fractals/lorenz/ It sounds like Metatron has discovered such an attractor based on micro-fossil records. This should be no surprise to mathematicians or computer-scientists. Metatron~ Your writings are hard to follow because 1) you are working in a specialized field. You have to go slower and explain things a little more thourouly. 2) You are clearly combining your opinions on the matter with what you have actually discovered. For our sakes you need to keep these separate. Present your findings first, then give us an interpretation (after we all know what you mean). Hope this has been some help...

aman~ It might be more mathematicaly correct to say that our existence IS THE RESULT of the monkey wrench. The universe is all about symmetry. Of course, if everything WAS perfectly symetrical, there wouldn't be any you or me. Disturbences in the universal symmetry create chaos and pattern (patterns are an expression of the underlying symmetry). And you and I are just patterns-- I'm simplifying, of course. My point is that math isn't just "perfect in general but fuzzy 'round the edges". It actually does a nice job of explaining all that monkey-wrenchedness.

Very good. That's what I was I trying to say, too. Guess I should just use some images. Your lolly roffle quote kills me!

Ah, yes. A dog named tripod.

I notice you all talking about THE BIG BANG. I should point out that recently a lot of new information suggests this idea needs to be re-examined, or at least tweaked. It may be that there was more than onw "bang". Also, on the topic of energy, no one has mentioned dark energy. According to particle physics, this is the most abundant kind of energy in our universe! As I don't a whole lot about it, I will leave the detailed explanations to others (or you can read various definitions here, http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsid=2040&dekey=darkmatt&gwp=8&curtab=2040_1)

As more maths are discovered, more applications are found. Increasingly, biology cannot be separated from math-- and hence, evolution cannot be separated from math. Everything from the way evolution of a creature is mapped (called phylogenics, see http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/clad/clad4.html ) to our understanding of how life and non-life might only be different in simple mathematical terms. What I'm saying here is that mathematics firmly SUPPORTS the ideas of evolution, not the other way round (refering to comments people have made that statistics show evolution is not possible). If you're not sure about this I recommend familiarizing yourself with many different maths (discrete math, algorithms and iterative maps, chaos theory, cellular automata). Armed with even a cursory understanding of these things, and perhaps some college level biology/genetics, one begins to see how amazingly SIMPLE life is, for all its complexity. Or rather, it is complexity born out of simplicity. If you want to see some this in action, you can peruse Stephen Wolframs "New Kind of Science" online, for free. http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html or read Ian Stewart's "Lifes Other Secret".

Yeah I've seen it. Wanna know how it ends? *snicker* You're right, it is quite good. I borrowed it from the city library. Have you checked out the NOVA website? Oh! I found it. The title is "The Proof" http://shop.wgbh.org/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?productId=11312&storeId=11051&catalogId=10051&langId=-1

I think maybe the name of this string should be changed! I'll start another about mathematics and evolution.

Hm. I like the idea of using an iterative map, but that seems impossible. Or rather, I should say, if I could define n+1 as a function of n (this is what you mean by an iterative map, yes?), if I could do that then I would already be a multi-millionaire! But maybe you had something different in mind. After chewing it over for a while, I think a good question is, "what is the largest distance between two primes?" Not in the strict sense, but in regards to those primes we already know of. Perhaps I should post in a different area to pursue this?

Swansont~ Whast you are saying confuses me. If I step outside and I am uncertain as to whether it will rain or not, I still can't quantify that uncertainty. If I say to myself, "I am 25% certain it will rain soon," that is completely arbitrary. This is why Johnny says you can't analytically prove it is (im)possible to be .7 certain.

Hey all. Something great occured to me this morning. I've done a little digging and as far as I know this has not been done yet. I would like to build a strange attractor for prime numbers. I thought one axis would be the distance between prime n and prime n+1. I'm having trouble deciding on the the other two axis and thought you all might have some input.

Quite right. I was trying to give the "most simple" method of solving. That is, if you've never heard of the Omega contant or Lambert W and still want to find a reasonable answer, here's how to go about it.

Quite right. This is transcendental. Mr. Wolfram informs me it is a Quintic equation (of the Bring-Quintic form). So without getting into the crazy math, here's a nice way to solve this using any old graphing calculator: You need to use the "intersection" function of your calculator. You will use two equations- one is y=0 and the other is 20x + 10^x=0. Now find the intersection. Your calculator will ask, "Do you want to guess?" or something similar. This means it can't find the EXACT answer and you need to point it in the right direction. Just press yes, and you should get an answer along the lines of x= -0.045.... to about six places. I know this thread is old, but I thought I'd post this method anyway. Hope someone finds it interesting, if not helpful! =)

I usually search for particular topics of interest.

An interesting point. But keep in mind that one of the reasons for the Heisenberg principle is that the system is always disturbed by observation. It does not seem unreasonable to think that the system might be disturbed LESS at Absolute Zero and therefore the uncertainty in the observation would decrease, though I don't believe any such experiments have been done.