Where (extremely precisely) lies the notch?
I recall something that I believe I heard Carl Sagan say either in an episode of Cosmos or in one of his earlier books, that one could store enough information to hold an entire encyclopedia by putting a notch in a stick, if only one could measure where the notch lies to some absurd astronomically precise figure.
Posted on 
December 7th, 2007 by 
Simon Greenhill
2 Responses to “Where (extremely precisely) lies the notch?”
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Email Henry Updates to Me
February 16th, 2008 at 7:15 am
Pardon my uneducated lingo, but I have been thinking about this idea for some reason, although I don’t study science I heard someone talking about this idea once.
Do you know if instead of a stick if anybody has thought of using light measurements, or gravity, or magnetic charges, or even picking two celestial bodies that have the right distance between them for this.
Is their some force in nature that we can produce at a very fine accuracy. Or could we raise and lower an object so that its gravitional pull would be at a certain level. Or could we produce colored light in a spectrum that would have a certain value, or somehow use lazers and lens to create a number from light frequency.
The problem to me seems to finding some force which is unchanging or some reference point in the natural universe which we can measure from. It would probably have to be something that was unaffected by gross distortions and would have to be measured from light or more likely gravitational pull.
Any thoughts?
February 21st, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Hi Ron!
Thanks for the comment - I definitely think this is a fun and solvable *thought* problem, but this is beyond my physics capabilities!
At the root of, as you say, is just a problem of specifying some consistent encoding scheme. Look at modern computers - all the webpages you’re seeing right now are basically the outcome of some information encoded using electrons. Above a certain threshold, we call it a “1″, below this threshold we call it a “0″. Then it’s just a matter of translating that somehow.
I certainly think there are plenty of ways to do this - your lasers/light idea works well - it’s how fiber optic cables work anyway, right? Another idea may be the chemical/atomic composition of a certain region of space. If it has >N helium atoms, it’s a 1, otherwise it’s a 0.
Fun! :)