Friday, February 9, 2007

Lab 4 Notes on Modeling the World

The dictionary’s definition of model is “a standard or example for imitation or comparison.” It is a representation that acts as a prototype for something. Symbols are intangibles of the world. They are abstractions used for easier communication and manipulations. Because symbols are abstract they are easily manipulated and created as new. Aristotle was the first to relate information to physics and its concepts. He related the rules upon symbols to the law-like behavior of the world. Physics and the help of Aristotle and Galileo allowed information to be measured quantitatively with actual number measurements and abstraction. Heinrich Hertz called images a “physical theory becomes about building relationships among observationally-derived symbols: Models.” He came up with hypotheses about how to anticipate about future events so we can arrange our present things as well. Anything can be modeled. If I wanted to model a plant in terms of number and letters it can be done. According to Fibonacci and his L theory, you can use symbols such as B and A. You start off at B and make B=A, and A= BA. Many things are deceiving in the world and can be liked or dislike by many, but in order to have that dislike information must be flowing all around us.

1 comment:

Bharat said...

You make a very important point about the motivation for constructing a model-namely abstractions being easier to manipulate, we would like to see things in abstract form. However, another key aspect of a model is the ability to predict things-in fact it is a measure of how good a model is-a model that can make better predictions is always chosen above one that makes poorer predictions.

I would be more careful when saying "anything can be modeled" !!

--Bharat