"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

the dayтАЩs blanching heat would have started to subside, and the riverтАЩs gorge walls would be nearly
empty of climbers. He could climb until well past sunset, and do some more thinking about this algorithm,
out where he thought best these days, on the hard old schist walls of the only place in the Washington
D.C. area where a scrap of nature had survived.
M
athematics sometimes seems like a universe of its own. But it comes to us as part of the brainтАЩs
engagement with the world, and appears to be part of the world, its structure or recipe.

Over historical time humanity has explored farther and farther into the various realms of mathematics, in a
cumulative and collective process, an ongoing conversation between the species and reality. The
discovery of the calculus. The invention of formal arithmetic and symbolic logic, both mathematicizing the
instinctive strategies of human reason, making them as distinct and solid as geometric proofs. The attempt
to make the entire system contained and self-consistent. The invention of set theory, and the finessing of
the various paradoxes engendered by considering sets as members of themselves. The discovery of the
incompletability of all systems. The step-by-step mechanics of programming new calculating machines.
All this resulted in an amalgam of math and logic, the symbols and methods drawn from both realms,
combining in the often long and complicated operations that we call algorithms.

In the time of the development of the algorithm, we also made discoveries in the real world: the double
helix within our cells. DNA. Within half a century the whole genome was read, base pair by base pair.
Three billion base pairs, parts of which are called genes, and serve as instruction packets for protein
creation.

But despite the fully explicated genome, the details of its expression and growth are still very mysterious.
Spiraling pairs of cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine: we know these are instructions for growth, for
the development of life, all coded in sequences of paired elements. We know the elements; we see the
organisms. The code between them remains to be learned.

Mathematics continues to develop under the momentum of its own internal logic, seemingly independent
of everything else. But several times in the past, purely mathematical developments have later proved to
be powerfully descriptive of operations in nature that were either unknown or unexplainable at the time
the math was being developed. This is a strange fact, calling into question all that we think we know
about the relationship between math and reality, the mind and the cosmos.

Perhaps no explanation of this mysterious adherence of nature to mathematics of great subtlety will ever
be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the operations called algorithms become ever more convoluted and
interesting to those devising them. Are they making portraits, recipes, magic spells? Does reality use
algorithms, do genes use algorithms? The mathematicians canтАЩt say, and many of them donтАЩt seem to
care. They like the work, whatever it is.




LEO MULHOUSE kissed his wife Roxanne and left their bedroom. In the living room the light was
halfway between night and dawn. He went out onto their balcony: screeching gulls, the rumble of the surf
against the cliff below. The vast gray plate of the Pacific Ocean.

Leo had married into this spectacular house, so to speak; Roxanne had inherited it from her mother. Its
view from the edge of the sea cliff in Leucadia, California, was something Leo loved, but the little grass
yard below the second-story porch was only about fifteen feet wide, and beyond it was an open gulf of