Time to re-boot

Woho fellow simulants I have just read an interesting book review at http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2006-03/000664.html

If you remember my previous rambling about my conjecture that the great universal truth (or theory of everything) would resolve in terms of information theory? Well this guy suggests an even bigger Matrix like alternative.

The guts of it are that there is no reason why we aren’t living in some huge simulation and gives some interesting observations to fortify this conjecture. He even goes on to suggest there is no valid reason why our universe is not a simulation running on some higher simulation. Like all good scientists he suggests some tests to probe if this conjecture. It all starts with some civilisation that has surpassed the technological singularity (you know computing developed to the point of indigence and hence exponential growth in computational power).

Here are some cuttings from the review….

“What would we expect to see if we inhabited a simulation? Well, there would probably be a discrete time step and granularity in position fixed by the time and position resolution of the simulation—check, and check: the Planck time and distance appear to behave this way in our universe. There would probably be an absolute speed limit to constrain the extent we could directly explore and impose a locality constraint on propagating updates throughout the simulation—check: speed of light. There would be a limit on the extent of the universe we could observe—check: the Hubble radius is an absolute horizon we cannot penetrate, and the last scattering surface of the cosmic background radiation limits electromagnetic observation to a still smaller radius. There would be a limit on the accuracy of physical measurements due to the finite precision of the computation in the simulation—check: Heisenberg uncertainty principle—and, as in games, randomness would be used as a fudge when precision limits were hit—check: quantum mechanics.”

“Surprises from future experiments which would be suggestive (though not probative) that we're in a simulated universe would include failure to find any experimental signature of quantum gravity (general relativity could be classical in the simulation, since potential conflicts with quantum mechanics would be hidden behind event horizons in the present-day universe, and extrapolating backward to the big bang would be meaningless if the simulation were started at a later stage, say at the time of big bang nucleosynthesis), and discovery of limits on the ability to superpose wave functions for quantum computation which could result from limited precision in the simulation as opposed to the continuous complex values assumed by quantum mechanics. An interesting theoretical program would be to investigate feasible experiments which, by magnifying physical effects similar to proposed searches for quantum gravity signals, would detect round-off errors of magnitude comparable to the cosmological constant.”

It is interesting to note that recent observations put the value of the cosmological constant just above zero at about the 120th decimal place…..

So our universe was created by some junior geek to earn extra points in science class…..

There is a God, Alfred be thy name.