'Ten Martini' Proof Uses Number Theory to Explain Quantum Fractals

23 pseudolus 4 8/26/2025, 10:23:18 AM quantamagazine.org ↗

Comments (4)

hawkjo · 1h ago
The cantor set exists in a real phenomenon? Any real phenomenon? That makes me feel like we live in a simulation perhaps more than anything else I’ve heard. This story is a nice description of the people, but I want more on implications. What is going on here?
anthk · 50m ago
https://www.recursivebecoming.info/RBT_v1.0_release.pdf

Also: Church encodings for integers and bootstrapping number systems from the empty set. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding And Lisp, of course; where the book Gödel, Escher, Bach shows's up how to build a number system from empty lists:

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/church_encoding.html

taneq · 37m ago
An approximation, I’d imagine. I wouldn’t expect it to manifest in any real physical sense, any more than I’d expect an actual physical “unit circle” object to have a circumference of exactly two Pi.
gsf_emergency_2 · 15m ago
It's as much an approx as any physical measurement is. As for "real world" implications, Hinton probably deserves the physics Nobel more than (the) Hofstadter who predicted this phenom (as a grad student)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_butterfly#:~:te...