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Comment by bglusman | Hacker News Reader

You might be interested in Lee Smolin’s book which explores this very hypothesis, among others and a generally fascinating review of how physics got where it is…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos

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When I was a grad student I once attended a lecture by Kip Thorne (before he won the Nobel prize but after Interstellar came out). He basically implied something that is vaguely heretical (and kinda tangential to the above): we should look for aliens inside black holes because thats where they prefer to be. For one, from their point of view (and this situation was sort of enacted in Interstellar) they can observe our epic timescales in “real time”. This puts the phrase “angels dancing on the head of a pin” in a new light, where pin could be loosely interpreted to mean “singularity”, I suppose.

FWIW, I could be mistaken, but I once heard that the spirit of that question (angels on the head of the pin) was less about realism than countability -- i.e. more like asking about the countablility of the Real Numbers in an interval, or something of that sort. One way or another I took it as a much more generous description.

Interesting, do you have a citation? The Wikipedia page mentions nothing like that..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on_t...

'Countability' is too precise a term for the meaning or context. The article as I read it makes the core point I wanted to express: a derisive reference to scholarship of the time period as obcessed with "angels on pinheads" is probably ungenerous.

If you know of JMG one statement of his was roughly this: Every school-child (of that time period) used to know that an 'eternal being' was outside of time, not a being [within time] that would "live forever."

That is, 'eternal' apparently had a precise sense [then] which most are now ignorant of. Again, I could be wrong.

It is hard for me to look down on curiousity about "what could be outside of time" when it remains a popular science question -- i.e., where did the big bang happen?, etc

Based on your nick, I’m guessing that Kip Thorne lecture didn’t help your grades.

He turned me into a new believer so what can I do? At least i have someone to blame now

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