Contributed by
Vijay Fafat
Douglas Preston's novel, “Blasphemy”, contains a few mathematical references that come up when scientists encounter “God” at the (hypothetical) world's largest particle collider, SSC II. Chaitin's Omega number appears along with “e”, as does Knuth's up-arrow notation (in specifying an ultra-large number dubbed “God's First Number”). The universe is described by “God” as an irreducible computation whose output would require a complete computation lasting God's-First-Number years. There are a couple of nice paragraphs, where “God” says: “You give me a hand with 5 fingers, not the integer 5. Your number system has no independent existence in the real world. It is nothing more than a sophisticated metaphor” and “[you are] like a monkey who has figured out how to count to three. You find four pebbles and think you have discovered infinity”.
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