Science memes

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Imagine this is a pic:

"I have seen some ultrafinitists go so far as to challenge the existence of 2^100 as a natural number, in the sense of there being a series of "points" of that length. There is the obvious "draw the line" objection, asking where in 2^1, 2^2, 2^3, … , 2^100 do we stop having "Platonistic reality"? Here this … is totally innocent, in that it can be easily be replaced by 100 items (names) separated by commas. I raised just this objection with the (extreme) ultrafinitist Yessenin-Volpin during a lecture of his. He asked me to be more specific. I then proceeded to start with 2^1 and asked him whether this is "real" or something to that effect. He virtually immediately said yes. Then I asked about 2^2, and he again said yes, but with a perceptible delay. Then 2^3, and yes, but with more delay. This continued for a couple of more times, till it was obvious how he was handling this objection. Sure, he was prepared to always answer yes, but he was going to take 2^100 times as long to answer yes to 2^100 then he would to answering 2^1. There is no way that I could get very far with this. "

— Harvey M. Friedman, "Philosophical Problems in Logic"

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by danekrae@lemmy.world to c/science_memes@lemmy.world
 
 

Australia: We have so many different, exciting and beautiful animals. A lot more than you.

UK: Not to brag, but...

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cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/31241953

2040s: RNA formed the basis for life each of the five known times it arose on the early Earth.

https://explainxkcd.com/3056/

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