The Largest Virtual Universe Ever Simulated
sciencealert.com
sciencealert.com
I'm just spewing nonsense, but this is the sort of stuff that makes for a great talk over a beer.
See Feynman on the subject: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman....
Thanks for the notes and the links. I've recently started to work my way through Feynman's lectures a I'm considering a return to school for physics particularly because of the excitement it brings me to be able to even just peek beneath the covers. I want to be able to rip them off the whole damned bed and leave the sleepers exposed! But I digress...
Who is to say the quantum effects are not actually artifacts of some optimizations in the simulation we are in?
How can you tell?
There may be a whole different theory of physics which can replace quantum mechanics and doesn't have wavefunctions, and has completely different simulation requirements, but at that point you could postulate anything.
The wave function doesn't really have to "run" to exist though... a wave doesn't actually have any influence on anything until it is collapsed. If nothing observes the wave, it won't have any affect at all. It will just be there, in some cosmic register, waiting for some dust cloud to inquire about it.
Consider a polygon in a game engine, which started at 0,0 and has a known velocity. You are at tick 4762, and that polygon is represented by a position function, but it doesn't actually "run" until you declare a tick, and do the math.
Your example of a polygon with a constant velocity is carefully chosen: that equation has an analytical solution, so you can calculate x(t) and "skip" forward in time. This is not possible in general, even in classical mechanics. If it were a system of more than two interacting particles, you wouldn't be able to fast-forward; you would have to calculate all the intermediate timesteps even if you only wanted the last one.
Who is to say that the "universe simulator" is only doing 21st century math?
What if we just lack the expressiveness or the initial conditions to model a stateless universe?
A fun consequence of stateless universe would be that you can rewind, fast forward, loop, speed up, slow down time at no extra cost.
It's unfortunate how much the jargon around quantum physics has been misconstrued by the general public.
What you are suggesting is there is a hidden variable theory.
A lot of people make statements which assume the truth of some particular interpretation of quantum physics, without realising that it is just one of many. Many advocates of "quantum mysticism" are adopting the von Neumann-Wigner interpretation ("consciousness causes collapse"), and they often misidentify that as "Copenhagen" even though it isn't. But on the other hand, many of their detractors are committing a similar error, and presuming Copenhagen or many worlds as if it was the actual physics as opposed to just one of many competing philosophical interpretations of it.
Assigning metaphysical implications is declared out of bounds. It's a useful compromise.
[1] For you who don't know, the finger(1) command and protocol would return you the status of someone logged in and what they were working on (if they had set their status). Sort of like Google Chat used to do before they ruined it.
I have a similar story about, on request, describing the sorts of day-to-day things I then did to a family member who doesn't have a conception of what "internet companies" do.
It involved databases and the phrase "take a dump".
It doesn't have any quantum features, and if it did, they would make it require vastly more computing power, not less.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7bzE1E5PMY
Highly recommended for anyone trying to grok the relationship between a wave, a particle, and an observation. I find I don't want to hear what quantum physics is "like" I just want to have things explained to me slowly and completely.
The process which changed homogenously random points in a cube into those stringy messes, didnt even include gravitation. It pulsated the points and diddled random neighbours ever-so-slightly closer to each other over a few million iterations.
I realise that academic universe simulations like this examine with great insight, more subtle features but i found it interesting that the basic stringy texture does not require precise forces to self arrange.
described in a journal article 30 years ago: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1988ApJ...327..853R
Isn't that gravitation?
For this I was developing 'spatial splitting' routines, i was taking the end cells of the splitting routine and just moving there contents a little bit towards their centers. While this was going on the 'universe' was also expanding, contracting and turning inside out in a neverending series of big bang and crunches. It looked pretty. The stringification occured with a few different 'end cell' testing functions i happened to try out. I just noticed it wasnt difficult to bring about that structure, unlike other structures which are more difficult to bring about - like accretion disks.
https://github.com/strainer/particloud55
There is a link in the readme to it running on webgl.
Its very old experimental code, i just noticed this stringifying happening on a number of revisions.
The project is more substantial and mature now but it no longer stringifies clouds \ :) /
The distortion and eventual 'stringification' of the undulating point groups occurs over minutes or hours of runtime.
If you want to worry about overlooking artificial life, a more interesting scenario is some kind of evolutionary pressure among malware, leading to a computational equivalent of roaches or even crafty raccoons, stealing a living from our internet-of-things trash cans.