Posted by Jock on September 16, 2005 at 16:28:12 from 217.172.246.144 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: Purely AR: posted by Owen Roberts on September 16, 2005 at 15:38:53:
Can information escape from a black hole (ie WH Chapter 2 star gazing)?
The theory is as I understand it is no?
Yet how do we know about the black hole if no info escapes, surely the absence of info to a noticable stage is info? Guy can you answer this question as I am outside my comfort zone.
If Stephen Hawking can change his mind on this that's good enough for me. There is information packed inside the black hole which will one day come out and information streaming out from the black hole's event horizon which tells us where to look for the black hole.
So by analogy, there is information that AR has hidden about the Crossley girls which one day will come out and information about AR's hiding this information which is scattered around, but can be found by looking carefully enough for it.
The only time you can be certain that you have a cat is when it is either eating washing or sleeping within your range of vision - even then it may not be your(?) cat but next door's cat.
Precisely, the behaviour of indiviual cats like the behaviour of electrons can be modelled best using Quantum Mechanics, but even with QM we can't know everything about a specific cat. We can, however, postulate a region in space where there is a high probability of finding a cat and a region where there is a low probability. But we can't be certain whether this cat is yours or the neighbour's cat. However, by shooting cats at high velocity through cloud chambers we can track their motion indirectly through the vapour trails that they have left behind.
A simple analogy for those who are finding the maths difficult will suffice. We cannot know of the precise times and dates of the meetings between Arthur Ransome and the Crossly girls, but the resulting trails can be read by anybody who looks for them.