The truth is...

It's impossible to write a program in Pascal that will loop forever.





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TruthBeTold = A statement that is logically or literally true (or partly true), but seems to imply something that isn't true or is just plain weird. (for rhetoric, logic or propaganda studies... or just for fun)

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@Pat Forever. it turns your computer into a perpetual motion machine and even if you pull the plug it continues to run anyway because it cant shut down the loop so it starts pulling energy from zero-point fields.

@Pat my computer is sub-quantum. It uses quarks and the strong nuclear force rather than electron spins and EM force. I figure while everyone else is wasting time trying to build quantum computers I'd just skip ahead to the next gen.

@freemo

When I used the term "sub-quantum" the other day, I was being facetious but I just searched and it turns out some folks are using the term legit.

I thought this out. If we're in an open universe, everything cools down to nothing and all information is lost. But if we're in a closed universe, it collapses to a singularity and all information is lost. So, either way, the program has got to stop at some point.

And if we ever figure out how to control time and run the program within a temporal loop, it still doesn't run forever, it just runs during the fixed amount of time in that temporal loop an infinite number of times.

There's no forever.

@Pat singularities, or what you really mean is a black hole, does not cause the information to be lost. It persists as a hologram on the event horizon.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holograp

@freemo

I'm familiar with the hologram theory (or theories). I don't think it applies to the collapse of the universe. It's a theory about black holes, which is different.

@freemo

However, there are theories that predict the preservation of information from one iteration of a repeating universe to the next. Rodger Penrose has proposed that once the universe expands to the point where measuring distance and scale become impossible, then that state of the universe could be considered a singularity for that reason (absence of scale), and we may be able to detect radiation from a previous iteration of the universe, if that's how it iterates. It's a highly speculative theory, obviously.

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@Pat all moot as we seem to have the evidence leaning towards an open universe at this point.

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@freemo

Yes, Penrose's theory is about an open universe. (I didn't make that clear.) I.e., the universe keeps expanding so much that distance is no longer measurable, because no matter can interact with any other matter.

By some definitions, that's a singularity, which starts the whole big bang over again. And he says that there may be some radiation effect that can be detected in the next iteration -- we may be able to detect radiation in the CBR as evidence of the previous iteration.

CBR = Comic Background Radiation

@Pat I am not sure how a universe that is so diluted matter and space becoming irrelevant would cause a new bigbang or be a singularity... but hey what the hell do I know. I'm sure he knew what he was talking about. I'd have to check out his theory.

@freemo

Yeah, I don't completely understand myself. I think it's in the math.

Conceptually, it's like, if it's so big that you can't measure distance, then there is no distance. And if there is no distance, well, that's a singularity.

@Pat If a balloon has -1 holes then who am I to argue that the a diluted universe is actually a singularity. As long as we are pissing in the wind lets add a few inches to my dick size too while were at it.

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