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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but wonder if, under extreme conditions, the universe has some sort of naturally occurring floating-point error conditions, where precision is naturally eroded and weird things can occur.

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That would occur if a naked singularity could exist. If black holes have a singularity then you could remove the event horizon. In general relativity, the mathematical condition for the existence of a black hole with an event horizon is simple. It is given by the following inequality: M^2 > (J/M)^2 + Q^2, where M is the mass of the black hole, J is its angular momentum and Q is its charge.

Getting rid of the event horizon is simply a question of increasing the angular momentum and/or charge of this object until the inequality is reversed. When that happens the event horizon disappears and the exotic object beneath emerges.

I doubt it. Even the simplest physical system requires a truly insane number of basic operations. Practically everything is integrals-over-infinity. If there were implemented in a floating-point system, you'd need umpteen gazillion bits to avoid flagrant errors from happening all the time.

It's not impossible that the universe is somehow implemented in an "umpteen gazillion bits, but not more" system, but it strikes me as a lot more likely that it really is just a real-number calculation.

Right, I don't mean literally floating-point errors, but something similar.

That could very well be what the quantum uncertainty principal is, floating point non deterministic errors. It also could just be drawing comparisons among different problem domains.

The QUP is indeed what allows to quantize continuous equations with h, and once they have been turned into integers like this we can then meaningfully calculate our lack of information (aka 'entropy').

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