James Gleick on Nostr: npub1skvad…laky3 To me, Ptolemy’s and Copernicus’s accounts of planetary motion ...
npub1skvad2l2wrxgdmt6yxk9kt2rjhw5tucjzhf54pktfq2gg0qhgwyqdlaky3 (npub1skv…aky3) To me, Ptolemy’s and Copernicus’s accounts of planetary motion are theories. A theory is a compression algorithm: a simpler representation of a mass of empirical data. An effective compression algorithm relies on discovering patterns amid the data, and so does a good theory.
If you say a shorter algorithm is a “better” theory than a longer one, you are saying something like Occam’s razor.
Published at
2023-07-28 16:37:46Event JSON
{
"id": "e30ce0ea6f69af558d798ee6af5247f8472ae2949aaaede103b577d4ef1f6bf0",
"pubkey": "f101ad76164163ee443948103f9b827b588bce93b80ca8f6870c4258e770f803",
"created_at": 1690562266,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"p",
"8599d6abea70cc86ed7a21ac5b2d4395dd45f31215d34a86cb4814843c174388",
"wss://relay.mostr.pub"
],
[
"p",
"c71a5284689572bfd0beef4cbb9b331e25b49be5535123c2692f4a13e17c0a48",
"wss://relay.mostr.pub"
],
[
"e",
"49a97fafe748dfd1ef23a97577552f108cc94bd4f7e8fc1a8411cf7a1ef668e0",
"wss://relay.mostr.pub",
"reply"
],
[
"mostr",
"https://zirk.us/users/JamesGleick/statuses/110792688694670107"
]
],
"content": "nostr:npub1skvad2l2wrxgdmt6yxk9kt2rjhw5tucjzhf54pktfq2gg0qhgwyqdlaky3 To me, Ptolemy’s and Copernicus’s accounts of planetary motion are theories. A theory is a compression algorithm: a simpler representation of a mass of empirical data. An effective compression algorithm relies on discovering patterns amid the data, and so does a good theory.\n\nIf you say a shorter algorithm is a “better” theory than a longer one, you are saying something like Occam’s razor.",
"sig": "f62c7703dd8a523e6b43f1b225fb9de5670e4ca8fdf007d8f2aee55d2c9e2deaf47c3188bfcffe6d0212272f92ae904288a92a530a8b7d98759ceb11d6b6ec91"
}
