Related papers: The Universe is not a Computer
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
This article reviews the history of digital computation, and investigates just how far the concept of computation can be taken. In particular, I address the question of whether the universe itself is in fact a giant computer, and if so,…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
Some contemporary views of the universe assume information and computation to be key in understanding and explaining the basic structure underpinning physical reality. We introduce the Computable Universe exploring some of the basic…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Suspicions that the world might be some sort of a machine or algorithm existing ``in the mind'' of some symbolic number cruncher have lingered from antiquity. Although popular at times, the most radical forms of this idea never reached…
Physical processes are computations only when we use them to externalize thought. Computation is the performance of one or more fixed processes within a contingent environment. We reformulate the Church-Turing thesis so that it applies to…
Quantum Mechanics, the physical theory describing the microworld, represents one of science's greatest triumphs. It lies at the root of all modern digital technologies and offers unparalleled correspondence between prediction and…
On the basis that the universe is a closed quantum system with no external observers, we propose a paradigm in which the universe jumps through a series of stages. Each stage is defined by a quantum state, an information content, and rules…
Our knowledge about the universe has increased tremendously in the last three decades or so --- thanks to the progress in observations --- but our understanding has improved very little. There are several fundamental questions about our…
Some principles underpinning the running of the Universe are discussed. The most important, the machine principle, states that the Universe is a fully autonomous, self-organizing and self-testing quantum automaton. Continuous space and…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics has challenged our conceptions of how the universe ought to work; however, the equations of quantum mechanics can be too computationally difficult to solve…
To better understand the deep significance of our best physical theories it could be interesting to compare our Universe with its models. It may happen that the differences between the model and reality can be made indistinguishable, to the…
In order to relate the probabilistic predictions of quantum theory uniquely to measurement results, one has to conceive of an ensemble of identically prepared copies of the quantum system under study. Since the universe is the total domain…
Physical modeling closes the gap between perception in terms of measurements and abstraction in terms of theoretical models. Physical modeling is a major objective in physics and is generally regarded as a creative process. How good are…
A physical system is determined by a finite set of initial conditions and "laws" represented by equations. The system is computable if we can solve the equations in all instances using a "finite body of mathematical knowledge". In this…
Is the universe computable? If so, it may be much cheaper in terms of information requirements to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply basic concepts of Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by having it follow from…
The idea that the Universe is a program in a giant quantum computer is both fascinating and suffers from various problems. Nonetheless, it can provide a unified picture of physics and this can be very useful for the problem of Quantum…