Re: CHAT: Religions (was: Visible planets)

Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > > the belief that exactly 1,114,111 angels can dance on the head of a pin
> >
> > Is that a figure pulled out of thin air,
>
> In this context it's a joke, being the highest valid Unicode codepoint
> and equal to hex 10FFFF.
Ah.

> > or did anyone arrive at it by some
> > understandable reasoning? I'm aware that the question of how many angels
> can
> > dance on a pin has been discussed seriously, but can't recall seeing an
> actual
> > answer anywhere before.
>
> The real dispute was not about any particular number, of course; that's
> an absurd caricature.  It was, rather, whether the number was finite
> or infinite.  A modern serious rewording would be: does intelligence
> inherently require some sort of material substrate?  A physicist might
> read it as: are angels fermions or bosons?
Are angels fermions or bosons? - I'm going to remember that one!

Now, this isn't my field of physics, but isn't there supposed to be a limit of
the information density of space? If so, and assuming that intelligence
requires information, that means the number is indeed finite.

                                                         Andreas