Thursday, August 04, 2005

the fallacy of concurrency

One of the things you learn in Physics and statistics is that concurrency is a fallacy. No 2 events can happen at EXACTLY the same time. There's always a difference in the time things happen - even if they appear concurrent. A difference perhaps not measurable by human technology, but a difference exists nonetheless.
But it would be erroneous to believe that no 2 things can ever happen at the same time. It's just that we can't plan nor can we expect things to happen at the same time. But doesn't it all depend on how we define the event we are looking for?
If at any point in time, you take a snapshot of the universe - a moment frozen in time, if you will, and observe.... a number of things are happening concurrently and simultaneously. Everything is changing, everything is in flux. So theoretically, countless changes ARE indeed happening at the same time. But the only difference is that most or all of the changes that happened in that snapshot have no relevance to us. If we could take a snapshot of the universe at the exact moment when something that's relevant to us happened, we'd see that nothing else that's relevant to us happened at the same time.
Did I make sense? Just thought I'd blog a random musing I had yesterday.

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