The following are Mark Miller’s words. He ascribes the ideas to me. Perhaps, but he improved them.

Designation Revisited

Back with Newtonian physics, and even special relativity, one could successfully pretend that there is a global coordinate space. Of course everyone understood that no one coordinate space was privileged, but you could still pick one and fit everything into it. With General Relativity and curved space-time, this pleasant notion was shattered. Space is just a stitching together of local geometric relationships into an overall curved fabric, but this curvature could not be described as curves in a higher dimensional classic flat space. There is only the space itself. There cannot be any comprehensive means of designating places in the space other than to use the space itself.

Similarly, Norm [as interpreted by me, perhaps badly] speculates that, not only have all non-capability attempts to create a global designation system for mutually suspicious distributed computation been flawed, but that they must be flawed. There cannot be any comprehensive system of secure entity designation in such a world that doesn’t follow capability logic. Note that “public-key fingerprint designates private key holder” does work, and does follow capability logic.

There are no global names. There is only the topology of the distributed reference graph, held together by capabilities.


Now I would only add that from the Newtonian perspective someplace in space “exists” if three numbers exist that serve as the coordinates of that place. In the perspective of GR, a place exists only if there is a path to it.