The
analog universe
Page
2
...up
with something very similar to what you began with. At each station,
the message would be...taken in, processed,
and spit back out; but it would stay the pretty much the same because
it’s hard to mix up ones and zeros. With
analog, you don’t have black or white, ones and zeros. You
have grayscale. You have decimal points. If you tried to relay an
analog message, you’d end up with static. With analog, each
time the message gets passed on it’s just another copy, of
a copy, of copy, of a copy….
A picture is easy to recreate when it’s just hundreds of thousands
of digital pixels on a screen. It’s hard as hell to repaint
an artist’s brushstrokes.
In grade
school, they teach you that everything is made up of little candy-colored
solar systems with a bunch of jawbreakers glued together in the
middle. If you're lucky, you'll go to a college where they teach
you that physicists think that those pieces of the atom are made
of even smaller little circles with names you thought were gibberish
from Star Trek. "Quark” and “tachyon" are
always popular.
If you become a physics major, you'll learn about quantum mechanics
and how watching things happen “makes” the outcome
change. If you make it to a master's program in high-energy physics,
they'll teach you about string theory and that the outcome changes
because those circles were really unimaginably small stretches
of space still shaking from the big bang. They are ripples in
the fundamental goo of the universe that are too insignificant
to see until they collide with other ripples.
That’s the entire universe: waves building upon waves until
they’re tsunamis that scientists, once upon a time, mistakenly
thought was actual "stuff."
After a PhD and more than two decades of institutionalized learning,
some physicists come to a conclusion that goes something like
this: waves are just a way of conveying information; all...
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