The NOT Gate (Hal Cohen)

Hal Cohen -- World News Trust

July 18, 2010 -- NEW YORK -- Since the 1970s, it seems that every political scandal in America has been dubbed something-gate.

Most of these “gates” have been much ado about nothing, and of little consequence to the American People. There has been an art installation in Central Park in New York called “The Gates” by Christo and Jean Claude that has inspired an ad for AT&T wireless that is currently running. Heaven has Pearly Gates. There are the Gates of Hell, which are presumably not made of pearl. The Secretary of Defense is Robert Gates.

I would like to talk about “Truth” gates, which, as so often seems to be the case these days, have nothing to do with politics. In this case, however, this is NOT true. Allow me to explain. Science, in general, and particularly mathematics, is concerned with what we can know to be true. Scientists conduct experiments and gather evidence to create a hypothesis based on evidence gathered. Even were they to correctly predict the outcome of an experiment 100 times in 100 tries, they would be hesitant to say the hypothesis is now true.

In math, we can construct arguments that prove unequivocally that something is true. This is important because knowing absolutely whether something is true or not is what lies behind the ability of a computer to function. Computers break down every function that they perform into binary code -- a series of 1’s and 0’s. Something is either true, 1, or not, 0.

These 1’s and 0’s get sent through a series of truth gates depending on the function needed. Each gate can have only two conditions and only two possible outcomes. For example, say you have an AND gate. An AND gate will give you a value of true (1) only when both conditions have a value of true (1). An OR gate, by contrast, will give a value of true (1) if either, or both conditions, is true (1). To get a true (1) when exactly one condition is true, you use the XOR, exclusive OR gate. By combining different gates, and this is just a sampling, the options expand exponentially. Have you heard the story about how if you got paid a penny on day one, and your pay doubled every day, in a month you’d be a millionaire?

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