CTO Articles
Published in IT World
E-Business in the Enterprise – February 1, 2005
Intuitive physics in the world of bits
By Sean Mc Grath
Intuitive physics in the world of bits
When you think about it, our heads are really, really self-important things. Our heads think they know how the world actually works. Every minute of every day, our heads are sending us messages saying "trust me, I know what you are seeing/hearing/smelling/touching. It's like this..."
Except it isn't. At least not always. Let us take two examples. One ancient, one modern:
Example 1. Ancient. You are in Ancient Greece. You are competing in the long jump competition. You want to maximize your distance. What to do? Simple, pick up a couple of weights, one in each hand and jump[1] holding them. That cannot possibly be right, right?
Example 2. Modern. You are in St. Louis, down at the river front, licking an ice cream. You stare at the Arch[2] straight on. It is taller than it is wide, right? Even when you look at the mathematical splendor of its blatant square-ness [3], it is still obviously taller than it is wide, right?
That little guy inside your head, the guy who knows how the world works, doesn't always get it right. The thing I like about the St. Louis Arch example is that even after you see how it works; even after you do the measurements; your head still insists in sending you wrong information. It is as if although we know one thing, we prefer to believe another.
Belief. I'm reminded of an old adage I heard about Irish fairies. A reporter once asked a man from the West of Ireland if he believed in fairies. The priceless answer was:
"No. Of course not....But they are there..."
I am also reminded of the phrase "intuitive physics"[4] that linguists such as Stephen Pinker use to describe the things we innately know about how the real world works and that manifests itself in the way we use language.
But what about the un-real world of bits and bytes? How does our intuition work in that world? If I say to you "this is a big car" your intuition tells you things. If I say to you, "this is a big file", your intuition tells you...less.
In the electronic world, there are so few solid frames of reference. Words from the physical world like 'slow/fast', 'large/small' do not stand still for very long. This year's 'fast' is next years 'slow'. This year's 'large' is this year's 'small' and so on.
Our intuitions about size are particularly interesting. Our lack of reliable intuitions about size regularly manifest themselves when we grossly underestimate the amount of time it will take to send, say a 50M-byte file from A to B. We really do not carry around terribly good intuitions about kilobytes versus megabytes versus gigabytes and (soon) terabytes.
Perhaps as we evolve - literally - we will develop better intuitions for handling bits and bytes. An intuitive numerics to go along with our intuitive physics. I suspect that when/if we do, we will also discover the digital equivalent of the St. Louis Arch.
Areas where our intuitions about the digital relationships between things are simply wrong. At least in the digital case, we will be able to ask the computer instead of asking our unreliable heads. We can believe the computer, right?
Right?
[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/11/1114_021114_GreekAthletes.html
[2] http://www.stlouisarch.com/
[3] http://dustbunny.physics.indiana.edu/~dzierba/slarch/
[4] http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,0_1000037824_BIO,00.htm