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djsjajah 4h ago

Not all things are possible, only potentially possible ones. If you take all the numbers between zero and one, you will find an endless supply of distinct numbers but none of them are 3.

caturopath 1h ago

For example, there's probability 0 of worlds where charge isn't conserved.

tcdent 4h ago

Aren't you really just talking about the level of abstraction being applied? If there are infinite possibilities between zero and one, then it's just our way of relating to it that imposes the perception of a limitation.

bryanrasmussen 6m ago

there aren't infinite possibilities between 0 and 1; there is an infinite sequence, the possibilities of which are quite strictly bound.

on edit: maybe should say infinite set instead of infinite sequence.

djsjajah 2h ago

No. You might be reading into it a little bit too much. My point was that finding three needs to be possible for you to find it. If you are looking on the interval 0-1, it is not possible. As other comments have kinda of suggested, you could map every integer to a real and find "three" but if you are going to do that, why not just look on an interval that actually contains the number?

psychoslave 1h ago

It's unclear to me at least what you mean here. In term of what is logically possible, if we take for granted that all integer numbers and more are mappable from a subset of this interval, then we do have this number.

Now, on logistical level, the mapping procedure is not free, it does have a physical/energetic/mental cost to handle it, and a more trivial representation of integer has a lower cost on this regard.

But the simpler integer representation can represent less many situations. If all one need to deal with in a certain frame is covered by a simpler shipper representation, from an economical perspective it can be argued it worth the risk of hitting a point where the representation will be insufficient as the situation evolved with cases it can't handle.

My impression is that your underlying premises are conflating all of this distinguishable aspects. But of course my impression is limited by my own narrow representation of the world, no matter how open and curious I can be about learning from experiences it makes me go through.

djsjajah 52m ago

I think you are overthinking it too. The task was to find three, not something that is equivalent to three. However you choose to represent it, it wouldn't be hard to come up with a different "three" that you won’t find within that representation. If you are changing the representation, why wouldn't you just change the interval that you are searching?

moi2388 1h ago

He means that 3 is not between 0 and 1, which it really isn’t.

packetlost 4h ago

Maybe you can theoretically encode arbitrary (but not infinite) information, but there are still discrete underlying states.

fc417fc802 3h ago

> encode arbitrary (but not infinite) information

What leads you to claim that you can't encode infinite information given an infinite set to work with?

magimas 54m ago

reality does not have an infinite set though.

Infinity is an abstraction that simplifies a lot of maths, it isn't real though.

mathisfun123 4h ago

Terrence Howard is that you?

lolakutty 3h ago

And can't one do all of mathematics without 3...(just map all the numbers > 1 to points inside the interval 0-1)?

dguest 1h ago

That's true for theoretical physics.

Experimental physics takes it one step back: it's all about setting bounds on what is potentially possible. A model of the universe might say that the numbers are between zero and one, but there's some other model that says there could be 3s.

Note that this epistemic uncertainty is not the same thing that the article is focused on. The article is mostly about one specific model, which itself has some randomness baked on.

librasteve 1h ago

Sean Carroll (name checked in the article) has an excellent podcast “Mindscape” (https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/)

I particularly like the one with David Wallace.

fxwin 1h ago

I love this podcast. The solo or very physics focused episodes go over my head sometimes but they're always a fun listen. I enjoyed "Jody Azzouni on What Is and Isn't Real" where they (among other things) argue about what it means for a thing to be "real"/"exist", and extend that to mathematical concepts, fictional characters etc.

dbvdh 2h ago

It’s not ‘all’ things that are possible, just things that are allowed within the laws of physics :)

Subtle difference, but energy conservation for example has to be adhered to.

rozgo 5h ago

"I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe absolutely in Hilbert space anymore." - John von Neumann

kdavis 3h ago

Surprising that he could have that intuition in 1935, before the Unruh effect was known of, before AQFT was invented, and really before most of QFT was formulated.

But then again, he was John von Neumann.

empiricus 1h ago

I thought QFT is using hilbert space still?

senderista 1h ago

google "Fock space"

rootedbox 2h ago

Just a reminder.. Hilbert space is just a tool/abstraction/map... and the map is not the territory..

dbvdh 1h ago

Not according to many worlds! I think nowadays many physicists think many worlds/an everettian view is most plausible

derektank 1h ago

You’ve probably been reading a lot of physicists that believe in the Many Worlds view. Nature did a poll of physicists last year[1] and it’s still only the third most popular interpretation, behind the Copenhagen Interpretation and information-based interpretations like QBism.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/07/favored-explanations...

dr_dshiv 2h ago

Yes! But at some level, doesn’t it kind of get blurred?

That is, we are trying to come up with rules describing the underlying rules, right? The world isn’t made of stuff, it’s made of rules, right? Or math? Just not the same notation, at least.

Help! I feel like I’m falling off a metaphysical cliff!

japanuspus 2h ago

No. The Hilbert space is the territory. Our perceived classical world is the map.

meindnoch 2h ago

Prove it!

ocschwar 5h ago

"What is a Hilbert space?"

-- David Hilbert.

cgio 5h ago

The nice additional reading is that you could even know what a Hilbert space is, but not what is a Hilbert space.

inshard 3h ago

Superdeterminism... quantum noise and the which way paths are all correlated.

thrill 5h ago

[flagged]

katzgrau 5h ago

Or, there is no time. Awareness traverses the grand graph of possibility.

Disclaimer: total armchair philosophy.

meindnoch 2h ago

What does "traversing" even mean if there's no time?

SantalBlush 5h ago

Given infinite time, is it possible to randomly draw a rational (instead of an irrational) from the interval [0, 1]? And if so, is it possible infinite times?

rablackburn 5h ago

Finally, a well-formed question to which the answer "42 (times)" is a possible solution.

LPisGood 5h ago

Certainly! Probability 0 does not mean impossible.

voxl 4h ago

In this case it does. Describe any effective measure to pick a random sample from the interval and you will have cheated into choosing from the computable reals instead (of which there is a countable amount)

fc417fc802 3h ago

I don't think that's correct. You're describing a limitation of our physical computing devices (or perhaps physical reality itself) as opposed to a theoretical flaw. At least as far as I can tell.

LPisGood 2h ago

Measure 0 is different than empty.

adrianN 4h ago

"Randomly" drawing anything from [0,1] is already quite difficult.

taneq 3h ago

You could draw a line, or a Cantor dust. ;)

In Hilbert space, all things are quantumly possible (quantamagazine.org)