This is my favourite short story written in any language. Remember: the precise description of you finding this video is described in the Library of Babel. The explanation of quantum gravity is contained in the library.
@@trenthammer4127 Yes, it would have to be either a worded description of QT (pretty difficult but possible) or the book could be written in binary, hexadecimal or greater (but hex is pretty data dense already). You could do a lot with 22 characters, especially if they are lower & upper case: that's already "44-bit" and you can create a computer to read quickly for you. Also, each page is about 250 words, and each word is maybe 4 letters? These books are 410 pages long. Multiply all of this and we get about 410,000 characters to play with per book.
""Remember: the precise description of you finding this video is described in the Library of Babel" Why is that? Can you explain? What is this library of Babel?
> The explanation of quantum gravity is contained in the library. As are a finite, yet innumerable, number of explanations of Quantum Gravity that are incorrect.
What a treat, and a treasure chest! So glad to have found your channel. Searching for Borges I found this video and then saw the library you've uploaded (in this hexagonal gallery with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle).
As always thank you, and Borges so inspiring for talking about a library, he once said a library could be a form of paradise. I agree, books and art and stories the true essence and soul of humanity
has anyone ever argued dat borges unintentionally illustrates a solution to tha fermi paradox here, in his description of tha library? it feels mad easy to draw hella parallels between coherent text & intelligent life
Well the writing of this story precedes Fermi's casual lunchtime chuntering, but of course, the best writers inspire others to think so maybe Fermi read this story and had an Archimedes-like moment. So you think aliens are floating down the Library's infinite abyss? Or just that there is much life in the ever expanding universe and distances are so great (and growing astronomically) between the various solar systems within the many many galaxies that we simply cannot see or hear from them?
A brilliant story. The use of the hexagon guarantees the most efficient use of plane or volume space, anyway. As others have noted, the introduction of a binary "alphabet" ensures that only two physical books are needed in order to successfully produce any and all possible texts. Personally, I could do without the omniscience of a monotheistic "God" -- and the narrator is third-person omniscient by choice -- but His presence is entirely consonant with the idea of "word", a Logos, considered either culturally or imaginatively.
Okey, one question. In this hexagonal library, there are 4 sides containing bookshelves, 1 containing entranceway and 2 small room. What about the other side, i mean, the sixth one?
There are five shelves, one entrance way, two small rooms on either side of the entrance way - a room to sleep in and a toilet. Borges reiterates the arrangement of five shelves corresponding to each wall of the hexagon at 4:11
From Wikipedia's The Library of Babel article: In a short essay, W. V. O. Quine noted that the Library of Babel is finite, and that any text that doesn't fit in a single book can be reconstructed by finding a second book with the continuation. The size of the alphabet can be reduced by using, say, Morse code, even though it makes the books more verbose; the size of the books can also be reduced by splitting each into multiple volumes and discarding the duplicates. Writes Quine, "The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two are sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters."
Could any "infinitely" long text just be the library itself -- and the monotheistic "God" referred to be the Logos" or "continuation" of the text? All of which makes God either "outside" His Word, or somehow restricted by His own divine Presence? Just wondering.
