It's the old problem of getting a picture of how all people think from sampling just a limited number of them. It is for example widely used in national elections and in market surveys.

The data collected is the known data. The rest of the data is unknown data. Calling it unknowable is misleading. In sampling theory it is data that exists but is not collected.

DocDick extends this concept to essentially an infinite amount of data that could be sensed in our subconscious if conditions were varied minutely. So at any instant of time he fills out the data set with an almost infinite number of points that make that set unique. He then includes an almost infinite numbers of points in time, i.e., different data sets, so that in each data set at most one data point changes. That is why he thinks he can express the changed point as a function of the unchanged data points.

But it's all sampling theory nevertheless. That field is based on extentions of Fisher's Sampling Theory. It even has been extended to deduce Schroedinger's equation, a publication that I can get you a link for if interested.

It is not true that everything is done by definition. He assumes shift symmetry and scale symmetry in the data. He claims that those symmetries are necessary and therefore not assumptions, but that is just rhetoric.

His math actually starts with those assumptions plus a binary type of data, known and unknown, from which the equations of most of physics follow, which are mostly wave equations. Nothing nonlinear or exotic like quantum gravity or quantum electrodynamics come from his equations.

All you need to understand is that conservation laws can be derived from symmetry and sampling.

yanniru

• truley this helps - sagefr0g - May 6, 2003 - 02:16 UTC