Could a Holistic Detective Agency Actually Exist?

Wowbagger said:
The spirit of the challenge involves answering "any question about the Universe". So, the table leg would have to, somehow, contain lossless compression of all the information in the Universe.

I suspect such a thing could only occur if the vast majority of information is redundant, and can actually be narrowed down to one or two "fundamental patterns", of some sort.
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Yeah, I think that's right. It's only possible if the entropy of the universe is vastly less than what standard coarse-grained thermodynamics says it should be. In other words it has to be in a very very special state, something incredibly improbable and finely-tuned.
 
However, if lossless compression of the entire Universe is not possible, I suppose the Detective Agency could still be in business if information about the planet could be extracted, at least.

When one is solving a murder in the neighborhood, one generally doesn't need to know what's going on, on Venus.

Having said that, though, I assume a table leg's information would not be able to automatically differentiate relevant Earthly information from Venusian information, if its particles were exposed to both, in its history. Except that the table has simply been on Earth a lot longer than in the mish-mash that would become Venus.

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Another thought struck me:

Any information one could get out of a table leg could still be useful in developing leads, even if it is distorted, and partly inaccurate. Maybe the leg would suggest that more precise information could be found in a glass table in Paris, which then leads you to a beach in California, etc. It's a very round-about way to go, but eventually, you could (in theory) hit upon direct evidence in one of the beach houses there.

The interconnectedness of all things does not have to mean perfect connectedness. I think Dirk actually mentions that "some things are more connected than others". (But, I am too lazy to look up the chapter, right now.)
 
Wowbagger said:
Any information one could get out of a table leg could still be useful in developing leads, even if it is distorted, and partly inaccurate.
<snip>
The interconnectedness of all things does not have to mean perfect connectedness.
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I don't think that's going to fly either. One way to quantify how much information the table leg contains about (say) some specific location on Venus is to compute what's called the mutual information or entanglement entropy of the two. But that's going to be absurdly small - which means that the chance the table leg contains even one bit of information about that location is zero for any practical purpose.

(Unless, as we discussed earlier, it (and Venus) are in some extremely special state.)
 
Can anyone address the last question? (slightly re-worded below: )

Are there any other forces, known to physics, that would make different material objects not effect other material objects, thus breaking any "interconnectivity" the detective would be trying to rely on?

Can there be a blob of "stuff" that can move and act completely independently of any other "stuff" around it? Is such material isolation possible?
 
Wowbagger said:
I consider Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams, to be one of the greatest novels of intrigue ever written. But, this thread should NOT be about the novel. I would like to discuss the scientific merit of such an enterprise, using general concepts from the book as a basis.

Based on everything we know about physics, could such a detective agency actually exist? Could we, in principal, use the "interconnectedness of all things" to solve crimes?

Or, as Dirk, in Chapter 10 of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, suggested:


(No, we are not going to discuss if Dirk, himself, provided a legitimately holistic detective agency, or was just ripping off old ladies. The status of Dirk's thing is irrelevant to the question of such a thing actually being possible, or not. Again, this is about the science, not the fiction.)

(Oh, and for the record: This has nothing to do with "holistic healing", or anything like that. We are more concerned with resolving murders, messy divorces, lost pets, and stuff like that.)

Sometimes, quantum physics is cited as a justification for this type of idea. But, isn't there a lot of uncertainty in quantum physics? Wouldn't the presence of such uncertainty debunk the very idea of holistic detectives? The "signal" would get more and more "noisy" with uncertainties, the more degrees of separation you are from the target of your query.

And, are all things in the Universe even so interconnected, to begin with? It seems vast distances, at least, should keep a certain level of independence in the actions that take place on different planets. Even if there is still a force of gravity between them all. If we ignore quantum uncertainty, could we still be able to interrogate a table leg, on Earth, to learn about a volcano on Venus, for example?

Are there any other forces, known to physics, that would allow different material objects to not effect other material objects, thus breaking any "interconnectivity" the detective would be trying to rely on?

Because, if this whole idea actually works, I may have a new business plan to write up. ;)
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Bolded by me.

Actually yeh, there is something close to what you describe. The axion particle which was recently discovered has the strange ability to move through matter virtually uneffected.
 
Wowbagger said:
Can there be a blob of "stuff" that can move and act completely independently of any other "stuff" around it?
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How would we know?

Singularitarian said:
The axion particle which was recently discovered has the strange ability to move through matter virtually uneffected.
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Nonsense, as usual. Axions have not been discovered. If they exist they interact, but very weakly - because if not they'd have been discovered.
 
sol invictus said:
How would we know?



Nonsense, as usual. Axions have not been discovered. If they exist they interact, but very weakly - because if not they'd have been discovered.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion

I don't say these things for no reason. Last i read, this was the consensus in a paper i read. It seems even to this day, the experiment ''could'' have been valid.

''The experiment conducted by Rizzo's team differed from the approach of the Italian researchers in the fact that at the end of a vacuum chamber, an aluminium plate was placed[9] to prevent photons from an adjacent laser from passing through the plate, where axions would simply pass through the plate and be converted back into photons[9] , and were able to observe a small-portion of the supposed-converting particles—to the number of 4×1022 photons.[9]

In the use of optical measurement and pulsating beams of light, the team showed through illustration of exclusion curves compared to the PVLAS experiment and another conducted by the BFRT,[9] that the axion had been ruled out but still remained a valid hypothesis;[9] the experiment counting as an important step in the understanding of the particle, with the possibility of a very weak coupled axion.[9]''
 
Singularitarian said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axion

I don't say these things for no reason. Last i read, this was the consensus in a paper i read. It seems even to this day, the experiment ''could'' have been valid.

''The experiment conducted by Rizzo's team differed from the approach of the Italian researchers in the fact that at the end of a vacuum chamber, an aluminium plate was placed[9] to prevent photons from an adjacent laser from passing through the plate, where axions would simply pass through the plate and be converted back into photons[9] , and were able to observe a small-portion of the supposed-converting particles—to the number of 4×1022 photons.[9]

In the use of optical measurement and pulsating beams of light, the team showed through illustration of exclusion curves compared to the PVLAS experiment and another conducted by the BFRT,[9] that the axion had been ruled out but still remained a valid hypothesis;[9] the experiment counting as an important step in the understanding of the particle, with the possibility of a very weak coupled axion.[9]''
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And yet in the immediately preceding paragraph.

Wikipedia said:
On 9 July 2007, a paper submitted to arXiv by Carlo Rizzo and other researchers from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique indicated with a confidence level of 94% or higher, that they believed the results published by the PVLAS experiment, in Italy were incorrect, and did not prove the existence of the axion.
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Can you say "dishonest quotemining"?

ETA. On re-reading this, it makes no sense at all. Apologies to Singularitarian.
Little sleep and not enough coffee make for a stupid and grumpy giraffe.
 
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No, i meant at the time i read the news in a scientific paper. I'm sure i mentioned this, either way, its just a matter of me having old news.
 
sol invictus said:
How would we know?
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Well, perhaps if one of two things were true, we could:
1. If it is not completely isolated, but mostly isolated, there could be an unexplained "shadow" of an effect on normal matter. Like.... I dunno... dark matter, maybe.

2. It might not always be completely isolated. Maybe it occasionally "bumps" into normal matter, and when it does, we can probe it. If, by examining the probes, the matter seems to behave in a manner than can not be predicted by anything else around it, that could build a case for such isolation of matter. Maybe.

There is a third option, but it doesn't help us much, yet: The matter can be isolated in 4 dimensions (our familiar time and space), but not in some higher ones. We would need technology to probe matter in those higher dimensions before we could detect it, though.
 
I've lost my mp3 player and my table leg refuses to answer any any questions on it's whereabouts.
 
dafydd said:
I've lost my mp3 player and my table leg refuses to answer any any questions on it's whereabouts.
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Why bother with that? The table leg contains your music, too (though I'm not sure where you plug in the headphones).

- Dr. Trintignant
 
I'd expect the table leg to be as capable of answering the question about the condition of anything on Venus (or anywhere) to be somewhat less probable than getting the required answer to any prayer.
Or maybe equally as probable.
Possibly asking the question of a astrophysicist while both are sober would be more efficacious.
(You and the astroguy, not you and the table leg.)
 
An idea for a short story started with the line:

"It all began when Derek became quantumly-entangled with the washing-machine".

There; I bequeath it to the world.
 
dafydd said:
I've lost my mp3 player and my table leg refuses to answer any any questions on it's whereabouts.
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Your table leg hates you. You need to ask the chandelier. It doesn't like you either, but it's in a feud with the table legs and will tell you just to spite them.
 
You can't accept advice based on spite.
Some means of getting the truth are needed.
How does one waterboard a chandelier?
 
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