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Cosmic Variance
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Perspective is Bidirectional

by Sean Carroll

Today’s xkcd captures an important insight.

Bidirectional Perspective
Click for the whole thing. (Update: Darn it, Cosma Shalizi got there before me.)

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March 2nd, 2007 1:26 PM
in Humor | 8 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

8 Responses to “Perspective is Bidirectional”

  1. 1.   sirix Says:
    March 2nd, 2007 at 1:49 pm

    When I finally started to prepare for my Hodge Theory exam You give link like this. Now I have no choice but to go through the whole archive.

  2. 2.   adam Says:
    March 2nd, 2007 at 2:01 pm

    I love xkcd.

  3. 3.   Elliot Says:
    March 2nd, 2007 at 2:48 pm

    LOL. “I love the punchline.”

    Thanks for brightening an otherwise dreary Chicago day.

    Elliot

  4. 4.   Kaleberg Says:
    March 2nd, 2007 at 3:44 pm

    Ironic that this involves Hamilton. Wasn’t he out walking with his wife when he came up with the formulas for quaternions and carved them on a nearby bridge. Obviously, neither he nor his wife had any paper, and they were Victorians.

  5. 5.   Carl Brannen Says:
    March 3rd, 2007 at 3:20 am

    I laughed, but I’m not showing it to the “physics widow”.

  6. 6.   Mohsen Says:
    March 3rd, 2007 at 3:45 am

    I’ve just read your post about the Boltzman Brains.
    I’d like to have my comment anyway, and here your opinion about it.

    1.during a transition from a low entropic state to a higher one, in the Boltzman entropy curve, there’s a possibility of having the nested moves against the
    current direction of change in entropy. For example in the midst of going from a low entropy situation, to a higher level a region can experiance a movement toward lower entropy state, and it can happen again and again in a nested fashion.
    In this case, we would observe a mixture of higher and lower entropy past. Isn’t this the case for us?

    2.The main essence of a theory about the formation of universe is the proper justification of current situation, and the secondary condition would be simplicity.
    But considering the Boltzman universe, current situation of the universe has the lowest (and exactly the lowest :) ) probability of existance.
    The theory minimizes the first variable instead of maximizing it.

  7. 7.   spyder Says:
    March 3rd, 2007 at 2:43 pm

    I can so see a scene similar to that one in Dangerous Liaisons, only this time the poor woman is covered in formulas. “You cannot bathe, do not shower, put on your robe and come with me to my lab!”

  8. 8.   Web Comics Have Got Our Back | Cosmic Variance Says:
    October 6th, 2008 at 1:54 am

    [...] geek-friendly web comics. Everyone’s fave Xkcd has been getting CV love for a couple of years now (and I’ve been remiss in linking to the latest size-o-everything visualization). PhD [...]





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