Johann Beukes

Self describing systems and a unified theory in physics

Posted by johann | Filed under Physics, Science

Can you find the next row in this sequence?
1
1 1
2 1
1 2 1 1
1 1 1 2 2 1
…
Read on and I will provide the answer later. A discussion with a colleague over the past two days triggered this post. Part of the discussion was asking the question where is the meta-data stored for particles (and sparticles etc) in the universe? Is it self contained like DNA in biological cells, or expressed in the laws governing physics? We never got to the answer, or should I say, we have not yet.
This led me to wonder about what is the nature of self describing systems as it relates to physics. The answer to the problem above is “3 1 2 2 1 1″ and the next row would be “1 3 1 1 2 2 2 1″. Did you find the solution yet? Keep reading, I will explain later.

In Software engineering the term self describing data, especially when talking about XML, is thrown around as if it is an absolute truth. Here I have to take some exception. Let’s look at this example from the probably most popular API in use today, Google Maps.

What does this mean to you?
<markers>
<marker lat=”37.441″ lng=”-122.141″/>
</markers>

What do you think does this mean to a machine?
<variable1>
<variable2 variable3=”value1″ lng=”value2″/>
</variable1>

So how is it then possible without a schema or meta-data to describe the variables in the second example? For someone not familiar with XML, how would the meaning of the markup is explained? What are all the semantic nuances that will govern rules such as data types, synonyms or related concepts? In addition, what are the rules around the structure and relationships to other nodes?

Obviously, some of the data are relevant to the structure and some to the specific implementation. Did you find the solution yet? Start from 1. The next number describes 1 and how many of it, 1 = 1 1, then next in the series will be two ’1”s as 2 1. The number describes it as one ’2′ and one ’1′ = 1 2 1 1 and hence next number is one ’1′, one ’2′ and two ’1′s so 1 1 1 2 2 1 and so on.

So this leaves me with an unanswered question. Can the laws of physics and in effect, the search for a unified theory ever be achieved if it had to also describe itself as well? This I will explore in another post.

Tagged : Physics, puzzle, theory, xml

Comments (0) | June 2nd, 2010