Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Smart Meters in communities

[Moz (list]

Sharon
> The whole universe is a system so each
> part affects each other part in some way.

Please, for the love of reason, stop digging now.

To the best of our present knowlege that statement is not only false, it
is false in more than one way and at multiple levels. Even in the common
"the universe is the United States" sense, it's false. The USA claims
rights all the way down, and the centre of the earth is not affected by
what colour trousers you wear. Sorry.

At the broader level, information can only travel at the speed of light or
slower. The universe is expanding, and the outer edges are moving apart
faster than that speed. Thus, no communication is possible, and those
parts cannot affect each other. We suspect that there are parts of the
universe that are moving away from us faster than that speed, and thus we
can know nothing about them save by looking at parts of the universe not
moving away that fast, and trying to perceive some effect.

At the lowest level the universe appears to be quantised. That is, an
effect so small that it is smaller than the unit of resolution does not
happen. Alternatively, if you prefer to think in probabilities, while it
may happen, it happens which such low probability that it might be said
not to happen at all.

But, this being science, it's also possible that the above is not just
wrong, but is so utterly incorrect that it will one day seem laughable.
The way the heliocentric model seems laughable today. That's the great
thing about science. One minute you're as certain as you can be, the next
minute someone proves that you're wrong, as wrong as you can be.
Rutherford splitting the atom... ooops, so clumsy, and oh my, our pretty
models are all broken now.

But you know what? Even though the bunch of atom-breaking physicists in
England did wreak havoc with the old models, those models still work for
many situations. We don't take account of radioactive decay in high school
chemistry, or relativistic time dilation when giving speeding fines. The
effects are just too small.

Moz