A World Science Festival event, from NYU's Eisner & Lubin Auditorium, Saturday, June 4, 7:45 P.M. to 9:30 P.M. ET
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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments. Which raises a question familiar to aficionados of The Matrix—might life and the world as we know it be a simulation on a super advanced computer? “Digital physicists” have developed this idea well beyond the sci-fi possibilities, suggesting a new scientific paradigm in which computation is not just a tool for approximating reality but is also the basis of reality itself. In place of elementary particles, think bits; in place of fundamental laws of physics, think computer algorithms.
But is this a viable approach? Is the universe the ultimate computer running some grand cosmic code? Join a discussion among the brightest minds in digital physics to explore math, computer science, theories of consciousness, the origin of life, and free will—and delve into a world of information that may underlie everything.
Moderator: John Hockenberry
Participants:
Edward Fredkin
Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Seth Lloyd
Twitter: #WSF11
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12 Comments
Add CommentSigh...how long did it take for the majority of humanity to realize that the world is not flat just because it seemed that way from five feet off the ground?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDigital, or any form of the Church Turing thesis, creates more problems than it solves at the scale of the universe. Understand that a Turing machine is predicated on discrete and independent states. One questions that must be answered before even considering the finer details is as follows:
If the universe is "digital" at its core, who or what made the very ordered hardware it runs on? and if that is truly digital then who made the hardware it runs on, etc. It's an infinite regress, the same kind of regress for one arguing the existence of god. Anytime one argues that order precedes disorder, they have all their work ahead of them; i.e. what caused the initial order.
The reason why the universe can not be Turing equivalent "all the way down", is because matter and energy are about their interrelations just as much as such events are distinct from each other. Particles must relate per all known physics. Even Schrodinger's equation is essentially an interplay between kinetic and potential energy. This exchange requires some means of engagement, superposition to be more precise. A truly digital universe will always beg the question of the analog hardware.
Comment 1, "wolfkiss" seems sane enough, but, the stuff above it smells of pop BS (please excuses my bluntness).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisR. Carlson
Related,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Secret of mass" states all mass is life and indowed with gravity , it appears to unite gravity with T.O.E. Theory of everything , defined below.
Secret of mass
So what's the secret of mass?
I would like to introduce you to a driffent way to look at mass.
Science has traditionally looked at mass as stuff all the things you can see and touch.
Science has been content calling it mass and stuff and they have gotten results with this method, They discovered the elements and made the element table.
They discovered molecules and they discovered the atom, and then science went quantum into the subatomic, the world of Lepton, Quarks and Bosons forces, what are they looking for you ask?
They are looking for the elusive gravity particle. " graviton "
I believe the reason they can't find gravity is because of the way they look at mass.
Science has tried to unite gravity with mysterious higgs field since the seventies , and T.O.E. The Theory Of Everything , The electromagnetic and the electronuclear strong and weak force, NOTE: It appears secret of mass unites gravity with TOE !
Their next hope is string theory and super string theory, which is untestable.
Where did science go wrong?
We are taught mass is everything we see, the stuff our world and universe is made of.
Scientists have said we are made of the same thing the universe is made of, Stardust.
Scientists treat mass as an inanimate object, a particle to be smashed at will, the problem is rutherford, newton or Einstein never answered the most important question regarding mass.
What is mass? Is mass an inanimate object? Why does this matter?
Q. What is mass, well let's look at the universe, stars, planets, earth, mountains, trees, man, dogs, cats, mice, ants and bacteria.
Q. What do they all have in common? Mass, Gravity and Atoms.
So if the atoms and gravity are the common denominator then the question becomes what is the atom?, Is it an inanimate object, let's see .
Oxford dictionary defines , Atomic structure as : Structure of an atom being positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively "Orbiting" electrons.
Oxford dictionary defines , Life as : Energy, Liveliness , animation.
As you can see for your self the atom fits the definition for life and is an animate object.
So am I to conclude an atom is life? Yes to be exact an atom is the fundamental building block for all life in the universe and right here on earth.
There is no such thing as an inanimate object, all mass has life!
Atoms make up molecules, molecules make up elements and elements make up everything else everywhere else.
So if mass contains an atom it contains life.
So if all mass contains life , and all mass contains gravity , Then the rational conclusion is all life contains gravity.
So the origins of gravity is life.
The gravity disappears at the subatomic level, so where does it go?
It's not hiding in the subatomic particles as the L.H.C. Large Hadron Collider has proven.
So where did gravity go?
It went in the same direction with life. So gravity is a manifestation of life. WOW!
Quote
An atom is life and endowed with gravity!
Ronald Alvarez
Note:
What this say's is the universe is made from life form, energy in to atoms, It's not the big bang theory It's the rapid expansion of life in the universe via mass.
The universe is a life form possably interconnected by entanglement.
Love the idea and the logic behind it. Lot of conventional wisdom from different sources suggests the possibility of the same thing like the relativistic views towards the size of things. i.e. if you were as small as the smallest subatomic particle you could consider the atom as your whole universe and many times that is just how we think about our universe as well, in the case of (L2 and L3) parallel universes . Or the many times repeated notion of believers that 'God is all around us', interpret it literally... and many other such things. Would be quite amusing to find out in thousands of years from now with galactic scientific and technological superiority that we are only some virus type things in a higher dimensional creature of some kind :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA brilliant statement:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this""Digital physicists" have developed this idea well beyond the sci-fi possibilities, suggesting a new scientific paradigm in which computation is not just a tool for approximating reality but is also the basis of reality itself. In place of elementary particles, think bits; in place of fundamental laws of physics, think computer algorithms."
These "digital physicists" must now be prepared to move beyond fiction to manipulate the cosmos - digitally simulating reality! It seems that in no time whatsoever we'll be able to produce our own reality! To quote, I think it was Herman's Hermits, "what a wonderful world that will be!"
I'd first expect physics to experimentally demonstrate that digital information actually exists as a property of elementary particles and that the laws of physics can be manipulated to construct program logic!
More than ever before, I am embarrassed for the rest of science.
another example of philosophy in place of science. For that matter you can speculated that the universe is a large bump on my backside ...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeeking or considering whether the universe is the "ultimate computer" seems problematic; however when we hope to ascribe a single unifying and permeating characteristic to the entire universe and all its contents, in the broadest macro as well as micro manifestations (and everything in between), there is one observable and wholly empirically primal force without which only chaos would rule. That force is "memory" (in its many guises). When atoms, quantum particles or molecules show similarity or replication, in the same way living cells show similarity or replication, in the same way galaxies, stars, planets, satellites and all other universal formations show similarity or replication, in the same way living offspring, etc. show similarity or replication, in the same way re-visits of past events and/or computer re-visits show similarity or replication, all and each may be set down as special (yet completely ubiquitous) memory. Without memory, the universe and all within it could not be. Therefore, it is memory which allows all to exist, to continue (and to propagate). Memory is the basis for all. Without memory, time ceases to be, as does all else.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt may be useful to ask two separate questions:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) Does a computational model more closely correspond to the actual workings of the universe than other models?
2) Does a computational model provide utility in how we think about and study the workings of the universe?
it is interesting to note that most "Laws" of physics are affirmative to question 2
but not to question 1.
If the Universe were a computer, then it could be thought of as an intelligent God. This would be a form of idolatry, like any image man makes of God, which the Bible forbids.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScientists alone offer no image of God, unlike most 'believers' who therefore do not obey the precepts of their own faith, and should best be ignored.
The universe can be considered analogous to a computer, as suggested by the logical structure we are slowly affirming by discovering the governing laws for an underlying reality that is self assembling/auto organizing, outside the constraints of our empirical knowledge or horizon.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suggest that matter is just but another form of energy. Thus what exists is energy and the different forms arise from the self-organizing nature of the very logical the universe.
Matter is made possible by the electron changing state (potential) without which only one element might be possible.
The evidence is in plain view, as always, but we're still blind to it. Comparing with a computer is what we can do today, tomorrow we'll have a better model and so on. Nobody knows the whys or hows of it all and the fundamental nature of reality. The numbers involved are not only beyond our invidividual grasp, they also escape all of humankind ability to fathom. And yes this is not for science to bother with for now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAsk yourself this question: what's the difference of being dead a thousand years or 30 billion years? The answer is in what can happen in 30 billion years and the billion of trillion years after that. Look at what happened in 4 billion here...( It makes a difference only if you have to wait with nothing to read, so being dead can be convenient.)
We can't affirm nor reject any speculations, just stay humble
Does art mimic reality or does reality mimic art? The concept of Virtual Reality has been a long explored phenomenon that dates back to the beginning of the computer age. Technology in the form of pc's have taken on the scope of rendering reality into the synthetic confines of the digital space. The concept of the Matrix was just one pearl in a long strand of movies like the Lawnmower Man,Virtuosity, Videodrome, and Total Recall, just to name a few. Let us not forget that the US Air Force and NASA uses VR in their training simulators for its flight training. With processing speeds reaching the Terra-hertz range, and beyond, the ability for computers will wipe these distinctions more and more until we will not know if it is live or it is Virtual. Remember! Giga-hertz. Terra-hertz. Peta-hertz. Exa-hertz. Zetta-hertz. Yotta-hertz (yotta-hertz is 10 to the 24 power). We have a lot of room to grow in the VR universe. Yoda said may the force be with you, because you are strong with the force.
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