The Matrix to Beat All Matrices!
January 15th, 2008
One of my favorite science blogs, Universe Today, has published a summary of an intriguing paper published by the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Aukland. Brian Whitworth’s “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality” considers a very interesting premise:
that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing….The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.
In layman’s terms, “Is everything that we see or seem / But a dream with a dream?” In many ways, Whitworth’s paper is a reformulation of the Simulation Argument, which suggests that the “universe” in which we currently live is nothing but a simulation of a universe running in a vastly-powerful quantum computer (either in another universe or in “our” causality-stream’s future). A similar idea is also presented in Seth Lloyd’s amazing book, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos, which employs information theory to explain that the universe itself is, in fact, a gigantic quantum computer whose entire “purpose” is to…well, compute itself!
Nonetheless, it would seem that more and more attention is being focused every year on the possibility that “reality” as we recognize it may not be the ultimate reality. But, fortunately, this isn’t some theist’s or mystic’s dualistic mumbo-jumbo: this is theoretical science at its finest. How likely is the Simulation Argument and other such theories of a “virtual” universe? At present, just as likely as any other scientific theory accounting for the origins and/or continued functioning of our universe on the quantum scale—in other words: no one really knows precisely what our universe is yet.
Fortunately, though, with the age of quantum computing soon to dawn upon our civilization, it will eventually be possible to test these hypotheses—to, in essence, hack our universe’s operating system and see what processes are running beneath those that we recognize as physical laws.
On way to test such a theory as Whitworth’s is to look for “glitches in the Matrix,” or observable errors in the universal simulation. In fact, I think we may have already observed one: the gigantic, six-billion-trillion-miles-wide “empty space” astronomers recently discovered in the cosmic background radiation. The gargantuan volume of space, six to ten billion lightyears away, is literally filled with…nothing. No stars. No galaxies. Not even freakin’ dark matter. It’s like a portion of the universe just…isn’t there.
Or, perhaps, like part of the program running the simulation of our universe has crashed. The big “empty space” could be the cosmic equivalent of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
Technorati Tags: physics,reality,virtual reality,universe,brian whitworth,simulation argument,nick bostrom,empty space
Add New Comment
Viewing 2 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
I find it interesting - you might want to give it a looksee.
Add New Comment