Physicists To Test If Universe Is A Computer Simulation
- Thread starter LateX'Dog
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"When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer that can.
This new computer will incorporate living beings into the "computational matrix" and will run for ten million years. It is revealed as being the planet Earth,"
Anyone facny a bite at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? or maybe a meet there?
The premise appears to be that the universe appears to be discrete rather than continuous. Our computers are certainly discrete rather than continuous. Therefore the universe is running as a computer simulation.
Which is retarded to the point of being brain dead.
Which is retarded to the point of being brain dead.
"When asked to produce The Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer that can.
This new computer will incorporate living beings into the "computational matrix" and will run for ten million years. It is revealed as being the planet Earth,"
Anyone facny a bite at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? or maybe a meet there?
Not tonight.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
Yep seems contradictory as well at first. It suggests that the simulated universe is so vast that it must have happened already which makes no sense.
However, if you assume the higher level universe has to be more complex than our universe I think it makes more sense.
My uneducated criticism would be though is that our laws of physics probably doesn't allow such a simulation to be possible. So then you have to assume that the higher level universe does, which means you have to give a prior probability to another set of laws of physics existing.
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It is an interesting hypothesis - I wouldn't call it a theory given that it is nigh on impossible to test properly and currently doesn't have any experimental evidence to back it up; nor much theoretical for that matter.
One way of "testing" it that I can think of, however, is if the universal constants that we are familiar with (such as Planck's constant, Boltzmann's constant etc) aren't actually constant over time - if they are actually a function of time then that would imply that this hypothesis is not true given that constants entered into a computer program should remain constant for infinite time. However, of course, these hypothetical developers may have intended the physical "constants" not to be constant - and thus we reach of point of "untestability" again.
One way of "testing" it that I can think of, however, is if the universal constants that we are familiar with (such as Planck's constant, Boltzmann's constant etc) aren't actually constant over time - if they are actually a function of time then that would imply that this hypothesis is not true given that constants entered into a computer program should remain constant for infinite time. However, of course, these hypothetical developers may have intended the physical "constants" not to be constant - and thus we reach of point of "untestability" again.
This is the future of science IMO. Digital physics and holographic principle, understanding that the universe is finite and made up on discrete units, which can be represented in 1s and 0s.
Skip forward to where Brian Greene 08:00 comes on:
Skip forward to where Brian Greene 08:00 comes on:
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I was just going to say that a lot of stuff is binary in nature before i saw your post, things are quantised, fractal, mathematical, duality etc, it's not so far fetched that the universe could be a simulation when you know that as well as how precisely tuned it is for life and how stable it can be when chaos makes more sense.
There's also stuff like wave particle duality where things can be in two states until they're observed, in games we only render what we see on screen, the rest is just in memory or simple background processing, perhaps what we don't see doesn't exist, it's just stored in memory and ticks along so when we look again it's only changed as it would anyway, there's no way to be sure.
Maybe we sleep because there's only so much cpu to share, half the world sleeps while the other half experiences, with dreams as a short bit of entertainment to make up for it, who knows...
Oh and i almost forgot but a scientist discovered codes built into the universe similar to those that do error checking in computers.
There's also stuff like wave particle duality where things can be in two states until they're observed, in games we only render what we see on screen, the rest is just in memory or simple background processing, perhaps what we don't see doesn't exist, it's just stored in memory and ticks along so when we look again it's only changed as it would anyway, there's no way to be sure.
Maybe we sleep because there's only so much cpu to share, half the world sleeps while the other half experiences, with dreams as a short bit of entertainment to make up for it, who knows...
Oh and i almost forgot but a scientist discovered codes built into the universe similar to those that do error checking in computers.
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Oh goodness, Brian Greene - the man who continually pushes string theory despite it still basically being untestable and thus not really contending as a proper scientific theory. So much time and effort has been spent on string theory, and yet it is flawed from the start. Sure it's a mathematically beautiful and elegant theory, but it's predictions cannot be reasonably tested, there are infinite variation of the actual theory, every time an observation seems to disagree with it the theories are altered... Ugh, of course I may be wrong and it may be a step in the right direction to a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) but it doesn't seem like it at the moment. We should continue looking at alternative contenders like Loop Quantum mavity and Supersymmetry (SUSY).
Anyway, sorry for that... I get very passionate about particle physics and quantum mechanics, probably shows that I'm a bit mental but then I am doing a physics degree so...
Well yeah, of course once an observation is made that is counter to a theory, the theory will change accordingly, thats how science works... I prefer it over SUSY, but have yet to have a proper look at the quantum mavity theories.
Well if you watch the video you'd see he's trying to get away from string theory. String theory, dark matter, supersymmetry and all that stuff becomes irrelevant from the information theory perspective, with entropic mavity.
Edit: didn't mean quantum mavity I meant entropic mavity.
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Of course, I should've made myself clearer sorry. What many string theorists do when observations disagree with their theories is actually tweak the fundamental parameters in their equations which should remain constant - they just essentially change numbers around to fit the new data in, not very scientific really. For evidence of this, read "The Trouble with Physics" by Dr. Lee Smolin; an excellent book that one.
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Good to see, I'll watch the video later. But, "entropic mavity"? I've never heard of such a phenomenon before, I shall have to look that up.
If you like computers it should make perfect sense. I started reading about it at this blog he has a bunch of articles explaining it.
http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/it_bit_how_get_rid_dark_energy
http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/it_bit_entropic_gravity_pedestrians-66244
http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/it_bit_whole_shebang
Let's all do it.. At the same time :O
If you are going to do this, please go to the extended complex plane first. I like living.
Like.
Must be *nix lolSo, wait. I'm some future-nerd's Facebook game? Boom. Headshot.
