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"Fact 1: MIT has granted Full Professorships to people without degrees."

Can you cite an example, please?

I don't believe that Ed Fredkin has any degrees (except probably honorary ones, I've seen him titled as "Dr." and he is certainly deserving), but he was appointed a full professor at MIT in electrical engineering in the sixties, while on his way to becoming a pioneer in artificial intelligence (reversible computing, the Fredkin Gate, etc.) and establishing his concept ("digital physics/philosophy") that the universe can be represented as a discrete/finite cellular automata, or essentially as a computer program. He dropped out of Caltech at 19 to become a fighter pilot and built his experience at MIT Lincoln Labs and through a career as an early computer entrepreneur, working with the PDP-1. He has held other positions as a professor in physics and is currently a "Distinguished Career Professor" at Carnegie Mellon.

I'm certain there are other examples where MIT professors lacked advanced degrees particularly in the early computing days and where successful entrepreneurs have returned for appointments. Certainly this is common at Ivy league schools such as Harvard where former politicians and other notable figures frequently hold appointments. To someone's point about accreditation, certainly the qualifications of the faculty are an important component but this does not generally require that 100% of teaching or research staff hold advanced degrees, particularly if they have practical experience and/or published research.

Well, you're in fine company.

Check out Professor Fredkin's site: http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/
He's been a professor at MIT and Boston University.

---That sounds very interesting. Would you mind providing a link to the literature that discusses that ? I have some trouble figuring out the thermodynamics of this. Perpetum mobile and such, you know....

Of course. It, at first, sounds too good, but here you go.

Rolf Landauer showed in 1961 that reversible logic operations could be performed by neither using energy or taking heat out. The same could not be said for irreversible logic operations.

"Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process" IBM Journal of Research Development 17 (1973): 525-32, IBM PDF

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In 1973, Charles Bennett proved that any computation could be derived from purely reversible computing.

Charles H. Bennett "Logical Reversibility of Computation" IBM PDF

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Later on, Fredkin and Toffoli presented a review of the ideas of reversible computing. The essential idea is that you can save all intermediary states between an algorithm to get the answer, and then reverse the process so that no energy is used, and generated no heat. Fredkin also indicates that if we switched from irreversible to reversible computing, we would expect to lose no more than 1% efficiency.

International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21 (1982):219-53 PDF

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And as an unsubstantiated claim, I remember hearing that due to heat/radiation sources, that volatile memory gains errors of 1 bit per billion with a time from 1 minute to 1 day ( I forget the exact time). To correct this would only require the entropy of deleting that incorrect bit. In other words, 10^8 or so magnitude heat shrinkage. But trust the stuff above.

(Many of these ideas were taken from "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil from page 130)

OK, you're not going to read it, so i'll give you this gist: imagine that there is a computer with a matrix of numbers in it (like pretty much all von neuman machines) and the matrix is being manipulated (like pretty much all von neuman machines) ... ok, so this big array of numbers is the quantum representation of the universe, we live in the bits, and the transformations are the passage of time for us, and none of it has any bearing on the real universe that our BOFH lives in. http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/digital_mechanics _book.htm

This is completely unrelated to the MPAA issue, but anyway...

I'd argue that nothing is analog. Electrons and photons are finite things. When you look at a piece of copper wire, you'll never see some fractional number of electrons zipping by -- there ether is an electron or there isn't. Some scientists and mathematicians are leaning more and more towards the possibility that nothing in the universe is truly "analog." Wolfram's "A New Kind Of Science" suggests that the whole universe (physics, time, etc...) is a digital computer of sorts. The "Digital Philosophy" crowd (website) makes a similar argument. Chaitin even argued that real numbers don't exist in his most excellent book. The book was available for free online for a long time, but it looks like it's gone now. It's well worth whatever he's asking for it, though.

Seminal paper on conservative logic which is clear, readable and built into an interesting unification of computation and physics.

If you want more than the Space.com article, read the PDF preprint entitled "Lack of observational evidence for quantum structure of space-time at Planck scales".

Just so people understand what's going on here, this work affects the many (untested) theories that posit some kind of "quantum of distance". There are two basic reasons that people are considering these types of theories:

• At very short distance scales, the two great physical theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics (the Standard Model) are incompatible. Something interesting must occur on the scale of the Planck length = 10^-35 meters.
• Many physicists have an intuitive distaste for the infinite amount of information required to specify the location of a single particle, in a truly continuous universe. Some view the universe as some kind of cellular automaton, again giving rise to a discrete grid and "quantum of distance". Proponents here would be (maybe) Feynman, Fredkin, and (most recently) Wolfram.

Anyway, what the current work does is put a bound on the "graininess" of space. Pretty clever, if correct.

See DigitalPhilosophy.org. A scientist named Edward Fredkin had formulated much the framework of looking at physics as being fundamentally an informational process.

Fredkin was the first one to postulate that information is conserved, and invented many
ways of applying cellular automata to building the framework for a new underlying theory of
physics.

Fredkin worked on this stuff long
before Wolfram started looking at it; Wolfram absorbed a lot of Fredkin's ideas in the mid 1980's, and the sad thing is that as usual he provides virtually no credit, in all of his enormous book.

The idea that there's an underlying structure to the universe that's executing on some finite-state machine has come up a few times. It's a reasonable conjecture. But until somebody finds a program, automaton, or a set of rules that yields physics, it's no more than a conjecture. If somebody finds such a set of rules, they get a Nobel Prize and go down in history with Newton and Einstein. But neither Fredkin nor Wolfram have done that.

People interested in the concept of the universe
as a digital computer should look at

http://www.digitalphilosophy.org.

Fredkin was thinking about this stuff long before Wolfram was born.

This sounds a lot like Ed Fredkin's Digital Mechanics theories. Which isn't surpising, considering that Wolfram and Fredkin used to work together.