[extropy-chat] Physics and simulations

[Chris Phoenix]

Please consider the following as stupid fun shake-up-your-brain
speculation, not as actual science...

Has anyone else noticed that the recent small-scale physics theories
look a lot like something that could be implemented on a cellular
automaton?  You could read this either as a reference to Wolfram (though
I haven't read his book) or to the theory that we're in a simulation.

We have strings, which "just are", corresponding to cellular automaton
cells.  And branes, which organize the strings into universes.  And I
recently read in SciAm (not that I trust them--they appear to be trying
to fill Omni's old niche) that our 3D experience may be a perception of
an underlying 2D reality.  And another article claimed that we might be
in a wrap-around universe, much smaller than it appears, and with
dodecahedral boundaries.  (I'm not kidding, that's what it said.  But as
I write this, I'm having intense flashbacks to Oliver Wendell Jones of
Bloom County.)

If I were implementing a simulation of the universe, I wouldn't use the
same level of granularity everywhere.  Instead, I'd make it fine-grained
around the stars, and use a coarser matrix with similar (but obviously
not identical) physics between them.  Dark matter?  Cosmological
constant?  I wonder if we'll find that the Planck length is different
Out There?  And obviously the wrap-around universe makes sense; wrapped
boundaries are common in simulations.

Getting really silly now...
   "What the--hey, we've got a buffer overflow in this simulation."
   "What happened?"
   "Looks like something left the fine-grained area, but is
communicating back into it about local conditions.  It's getting all
tangled up."
   "Weird.  Is it a bug?"
   "I don't think so.  Looks like it might be an emergent, but I haven't
seen this happen before.  Let's keep running it, see what else comes
out.  But this entanglement will screw up everything."
   "Do we have enough cells to extend the fine-grained area?"
   "I think so... let's see... yes, we can go another 10^50 steps or
so."
   "OK, let's go for it."
   <<From about August 1, 2002 to February 5, 2003, scientists noticed
unusual readings from the two energetic particle instruments on Voyager
1, indicating it had entered a region of the solar system unlike any
encountered before. .... Just as small bumps and "fingers" appear and
disappear in the rough edge of the water flow over a plate, Voyager
might have entered a temporary "finger" in the edge of the termination
shock.>>
   http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2003/1105voyager.html

Chris

--
Chris Phoenix                                  cphoenix at CRNano.org
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology          http://CRNano.org