Well, here I am writing another post on the lapcom.  That’s two days in a row, which ties my recent record, I think.

Of course, it doesn’t come anywhere close to being the longest stretch on which I wrote fiction and/or blog posts on the lapcom (or, well, a lapcom).  That stretch was years long.  It took me more than a year just to complete the first draft of Unanimity.

That makes sense, of course, because it was about 550,000 words in first draft, and I write about 1400 words a day when writing first draft fiction.  That means, let’s see…392.8 days, roughly.  I say roughly because there are actually a lot of digits after that decimal place on the calculator.  But my estimates of total word number and the average amount I write per day are not precise enough to justify any greater carrying out of the digits.  The numerals are all just for show beyond a certain point.  They may seem to demonstrate greater precision of data, but they’re just bullshit.

In fact, if I were truly sticking to significant figures—as I should—I would just say that it took about 390 days (of writing) to finish the first draft of Unanimity.  Of course, given that I wrote only 5.5 days out of every 7 (with roughly every other Saturday off, I was writing five days in those weeks, six days in the others) then the total time outside writing-time would have been 7/5.5 x 390 = 496.36363… or, using significant figures, 500 days.

Now, I did not reduce that to one significant figure to keep with the 7, because the 7 is actually a defined, precise, exact, and correct number that doesn’t vary—the number of days in a week—and so it should not, if I am thinking about this correctly, affect the number of significant figures for better or for worse.  No, it merely is the case that if you reduce 496.363636… to two significant figures, those two digits are 5 and 0.

That was a weird little way for me to bring up the importance of the notion of significant figures in mathematics and especially in physics (and any other quantitative science that might randomly walk in).  They represent a deep aspect of reality, not merely an arbitrary aspect of mathematical formalism.  You cannot take two amounts about which you do not have very precise measures, mush them together, and come out with more precision on the other end.

Walking four steps forward with your eyes closed, turning as close to exactly 90 degrees to your right as you can make yourself do with your eyes closed, and walking another three steps in that direction, will take you some distance from your starting point.  But it will not be exactly five steps*—steps aren’t a precise or even consistent measure, nor is your ability to gauge a ninety degree turn.

This is something that always mildly irritates me when people talk about their blood pressure using more digits than are justified.  If someone says “my blood pressure was 127 over 83”, I just correct it in my head—and sometimes in person, if the person is in the right state of mind—to 130 over 80.  That’s not just rounding for convenience of record keeping, that’s actually as precisely as you can get the blood pressure, at least through anything other than an arterial catheter with a very high quality pressure probe.

First, the measuring instrument is imprecise.  This is traditionally the human ear, but even more purpose-designed sensors don’t do very much better.  They can’t.  The tissue between the cuff and vessel, and the vessels themselves, all have too many variables, and all this can affect the measured pressure.

In addition there is the fact that the blood pressure itself is not constant, even from peak to peak and trough to trough.  Each beat of the heart varies slightly in systolic and diastolic pressure, and the blood pressure is measured over many beats.  Even breathing affects blood pressure, with slight variations occurring between inspiration and exhalation**.

It can be important to keep this/these fact(s) in mind when dealing with and interacting with actual reality, rather than the mistaken or simply imprecise ideas of humans.  But even scientists explaining science professionally often seem to miss the boat on these matters.

For instance, one will sometimes encounter descriptions of the weirdness of quantum mechanics, especially the uncertainty principle, that contrast it with the way we’re allowed or able to be precise and exact about macroscopic measurements and interactions.  They also state that we can measure without disturbing the system, and point to this as being different from the quantum fuzziness.

But, no, we don’t measure macroscopic things precisely, and certainly not with anything like the sharpness of quantum mechanics.  If you were measuring the mass or the momentum of a car, for instance, your measurements will have errors that, on the scale of quantum mechanics, might as well be as large as a galaxy.  They don’t effect our measured outcomes because even those are terribly imprecise, and for practical purposes, being more precise is not useful—which is good for us, because there’s no real way to get that error down beyond a certain point.

And our observations of systems in the real world do affect them.  Light hitting the car you’re measuring, and maybe the radio waves from the radar gun you’re using to judge its speed, impart momentum to the car, just in very small amounts that are far too fine to be measured.  Similarly, the light you’re shining on the car, including the radar signal, delivers a bit of heat to the car, which increases its total mass ever so slightly, according to E = mc².  But it’s a tiny amount, far too tiny to be measured by any instruments we have routinely available.

So, it’s not that the quantum world is fuzzy and the macroscopic world is not.  The macroscopic world is far fuzzier—it could hardly be otherwise, given that it’s made up of oodles of quanta—it’s just that we’re fuzzy too, since we’re also made of oodles of quanta.  And, of course, for most practical purposes, it doesn’t matter what the eighth (let alone the eightieth) decimal place is on the measure of the mass of a car moving relative to you with a certain velocity.

In case you can’t tell, this is something of a bugbear of mine.  I didn’t plan to write about it, but once I got going, it was hard to stop.  It irks me that even serious scientists, including theoretical physicists, miss the point of the distinction in measurement between the picoscopic*** and the simply “scopic***” scale.

I apologize for boring you with this, if it has bored you (if not, the apology would be pointless).  As you can see, I do tend to write more on the lapcom, because I can write much more easily and (for me) more naturally.

I hope you have a good day, in any case.  I’ll try to keep bringing the lapcom, but I’ll also try not to get too caught up in venting my mathematical/physics-related frustrations.  Exclusis improvisis, of course.

*Here I’m applying the geometry of the famous 3, 4, 5 right triangle, which can be perfectly precise as a mathematical ideal, but can never be perfectly produced in the real world.

**I wanted to write “inspiration and expiration”, which would be technically accurate, but the latter word carries connotations of finality that don’t tend to come with each breath.  Though, the dichotomy of inspiration and expiration sounds almost like a philosophical thought trigger:  when one ceases to be inspired, one merely expires, or something like that.

***Apparently, I just made those two words up (according to MS Word), but they weren’t made up out of whole cloth.  Their attributes follow, almost inevitably, from the logic and structure of the English language and the antecedent, accepted words.