It from Bit: The Universe is a Quantum Computer

[bryce]

Also, there is no spoon...

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/03/the-universe-is-a-quantum-computer.php

WHAT is the universe made of? Matter or energy? Particles or strings? According to physicist Vlatko Vedral's appealing new book, it is made, at bottom, of information.

In other words, if you break the universe into smaller and smaller pieces, the smallest pieces are, in fact, bits.

CONT

 

[bryce]

Whoa.


Computer, end program...

 

[ProtoAvatar]

Perhaps - but bits are encoded on a physical system, too.

 

[sojourner]

I like the tasty bits and the naughty bits.

 

[Jadzia]

These analogies are made from time to time.

400 years ago, the epiphany was "The Universe runs like Clockwork!"

200 years ago, it was "The Universe is one great Heat Engine!"

200 years + and it will be something else.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Jadzia actually makes good points

 

[BolianAuthor]

All the universe is a stage...

 

[All Seeing Eye]

God is a Dot Matrix Printer and the universe is a sheet of paper being printed on.

 

[bryce]

These analogies are made from time to time.

400 years ago, the epiphany was "The Universe runs like Clockwork!"

200 years ago, it was "The Universe is one great Heat Engine!"

200 years + and it will be something else.

That's a good point...one I have pondered myself.

Whatever the new revolutionary world-changing technology is, that's the methphore we use to describe the universe as..."The universe is a [BLANK} becomes the new paradigm.

Even go back to neolithic times, and the universe (well, the stars) was an animal skin stretched out over the world supported by animal bones or something...and before that it was probably a turtle shell, and the Earth was an animals body or something...

Still, each anaology does get *closer* to an accurate description to...whatever...the universe is...

 

[bryce]

Perhaps - but bits are encoded on a physical system, too.

Yes, but in this case it *wouldn't* be...it would just be pure information, deep down at it's base.

(Unless God is a computer programmer...)

I mean...really, what is a superstring? A quark?

What are they made of?? And what's what they are made of made of??

It's all just an abstraction, in a way...

A very, very similar idea gaining in popularity - it may even be the same idea, at heart, is that the universe is a hologram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

 

[FlyingLemons]

A very, very similar idea gaining in popularity - it may even be the same idea, at heart, is that the universe is a hologram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

It's already quite popular within certain areas of particle physics such as the study of quantum chromodynamics (the strong nuclear force) as it allows for the study of states of matter such as quark-gluon plasmas by drawing an analogy between that state and a black hole.

Doing this allows us to make a few assumptions about the the behavior of QGP (basically using some black hole thermodynamics, etc) and thus we're able to deal with the QGP state in an alternative way to lattice QCD, although there is some overlap.

The holographic principle, or the AdS/CFT correspondence as I know it, is very interesting, and it could yet shed light on quite a few things we haven't got the hang of up until now.

 

[Jadzia]

Could it be possible that all fundamental particles are little black holes? I mean we talk about fundamental particles as being point masses with various other properties thrown in like charge and spin. But by definition of "point" means they have no volume, and therefore have no surface... so should have an event horizon.

 

[publiusr]

Boundaries of nothing..and nothing.

This man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
Had a wonderful book Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics

Here are some ideas of charge without charge, and mass without mass:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00003782/01/charge_stochastic.pdf
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0701152
http://www.google.com/search?q=grav...t:*&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

I also think a little more of this man than Feynman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann

By the way, his Santa Fe institute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute

--had as a member Sterling Colgate, who I think was the heir of the Colgate toothpaste magnate. He flew in airplanes and tried to fire probes into tornadoes. http://postitcast.blogspot.com/2009/04/stirling-colgate-attempts-to-fire.html

The study of vortices may open certain secrets of the universe, or at least in biology. The Xenia Ohio tornado had (early on) twin suction vortices--that were in a double-helix form!

Later, one suction vortex split into two sub-vortices.

Since a tornado has updrafts, and a smoker plume is an updraft, it might be that organics were losely spun up, then subducted. Large vortex structures exist in the universe as well.

Perhaps we are all spawn of the whirlwind.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

Perhaps - but bits are encoded on a physical system, too.

Yes, but in this case it *wouldn't* be...it would just be pure information, deep down at it's base.

(Unless God is a computer programmer...)

I mean...really, what is a superstring? A quark?

What are they made of?? And what's what they are made of made of??

It's all just an abstraction, in a way...

The ideea of the universe being made up ONLY of information is not new.

But, as you know, information can only be stored and processed by a material substrate.
And, so far, NO ONE could even come up with the beginning of a model showing how information can be stored and processed without this material substrate. Until someone actually finds a way, this idea is just a REALLY WILD speculation.

 

[publiusr]

I think Tegmark was the latest to suggest math as the only reality.

 

[Defiant]

not particularly new, but not science, either.

Science requires that the ideas be testable by experiment.

"Not Even Wrong" is a good book on string theory that points out how String Theory may not really be science, either.

 

[Jadzia]

I think what's most important is not so much scientific proof, but consistency of the underlying logical structure.

Because when it comes down to it, what a scientific proof is actually doing is verifying this consistency.

Consider two different objects A and B that both appear to behave in exactly the same way in all our experiments and observations. They may be particles, or universes, or something more abstract. Now science will treat them as being the same, which may be an error. They may be completely different things that just happen to behave in the same way.

Now if A and B were explanations of reality, then they would be logically equivalent as explanations, since they behave the same in all our experiments, so they would both be equally valid explanations.

Now that possibility of both being the right explanation isn't a proof of A, any more than it is a proof of B. Realise that all we have done is verified the consistency of the underlying logical structure, which is common to both A and B.

***

Now I want to introduce here is Representation Theory. This is a discipline of mathematics that looks at the underlying structure of things, such as Lie groups, and tries to represent their structure with something very ordinary: linear transformations of a vector space.

When applied to particle physics, that process culminates in the Standard Model using groups of matrices to represent the behaviours of the particles, as is commonly written SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1).

While that does represent the physics of our universe quite well as lots of numbers, all it is really doing is describing the underlying logical structure. That doesn't rule out there being a tangible explanation for it all.

I think string theorists are simply looking for tangible explanations.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

I think what's most important is not so much scientific proof, but consistency of the underlying logical structure.

Because when it comes down to it, what a scientific proof is actually doing is verifying this consistency.

Consider two different objects A and B that both appear to behave in exactly the same way in all our experiments and observations. They may be particles, or universes, or something more abstract. Now science will treat them as being the same, which may be an error. They may be completely different things that just happen to behave in the same way.

Now if A and B were explanations of reality, then they would be logically equivalent as explanations, since they behave the same in all our experiments, so they would both be equally valid explanations.

Now that possibility of both being the right explanation isn't a proof of A, any more than it is a proof of B. Realise that all we have done is verified the consistency of the underlying logical structure, which is common to both A and B.

Your mentality is equivalent to the 'shut up and calculate' quantum mechanics doctrine.
Why?
Because it assumes that interpretations/explanations/whys are equivalent as long as they fit the experimental base/mathematical formalism.

However, historically, 'explanations' greately advanced their fields (example - Galileo's time, with the church insisting that humans should not try and find explanations for what was observed). But ONLY if these 'explanations' corresponded to objective truth. If not, they slowed advancement.
And only 1 explanation coresponds to objective truth - we live in a single universe with a single set of physical laws.

 

[Lindley]

Your mentality is equivalent to the 'shut up and calculate' quantum mechanics doctrine.
Why?
Because it assumes that interpretations/explanations/whys are equivalent as long as they fit the experimental base/mathematical formalism.

However, historically, 'explanations' greately advanced their fields (example - Galileo's time, with the church insisting that humans should not try and find explanations for what was observed). But ONLY if these 'explanations' corresponded to objective truth. If not, they slowed advancement.
And only 1 explanation coresponds to objective truth - we live in a single universe with a single set of physical laws.

Jadzia is arguing in terms of logic, not physical reality. If we cannot via any current means tell the difference in validity between two theories, then in some sense they are equivalent----logically. At most one of them can be "correct", of course, assuming they don't boil down to two ways of saying the same thing (which happens more often than you might think in mathematics).

I would also point out that "objective truth" is an oxymoron. I think the phrase you wanted was "objective fact".

 

[ProtoAvatar]

Your mentality is equivalent to the 'shut up and calculate' quantum mechanics doctrine.
Why?
Because it assumes that interpretations/explanations/whys are equivalent as long as they fit the experimental base/mathematical formalism.

However, historically, 'explanations' greately advanced their fields (example - Galileo's time, with the church insisting that humans should not try and find explanations for what was observed). But ONLY if these 'explanations' corresponded to objective truth. If not, they slowed advancement.
And only 1 explanation coresponds to objective truth - we live in a single universe with a single set of physical laws.

Jadzia is arguing in terms of logic, not physical reality. If we cannot via any current means tell the difference in validity between two theories, then in some sense they are equivalent----logically. At most one of them can be "correct", of course, assuming they don't boil down to two ways of saying the same thing (which happens more often than you might think in mathematics).

I would also point out that "objective truth" is an oxymoron. I think the phrase you wanted was "objective fact".

"if A and B were explanations of reality"[...]"they would both be equally valid explanations" - explanations of reality = explanations of psysical reality. Both can't be valid for a single set of physical laws - logically speaking.

"objective fact" implies an action, which makes it unsuitable. If you don't like 'objective truth', you may prefer 'objective state of being'.