Related papers: Is the Universe roughly-tuned for computing?
This paper deals with the philosophical issues of the notion of nothingness and pre-inflationary stage of the universe in physical cosmology. We presuppose that, in addition to cosmological limits, there may be both anthropic and…
Is the universe digital or analog? In this essay I argue that both classical and quantum physics include limits that prevent us from definitively answering that question. That quantum physics does so is no surprise. That classical physics…
In this Letter we examine the Multiverse theory and how it relates to the Anthropic Principle. Under the supposition of Eternal Inflation, the String Theory Landscape (STL) has reinvigorated the discussion of the Anthropic Principle. The…
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…
A closed universe with maximum life-time is constructed using optimal control. Einstein's field equations are used with varying cosmological "constant". The second time derivative of the Hubble parameter acts as the control function in the…
Whether our universe with present day acceleration can eventually collapse is very interesting problem. We are also interesting in such problems, whether the universe is closed? Why it is so flat? How long to expend a period for a cycle of…
Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of quantum-scale experiments, the physical interpretations of these theories remain controversial. In this manuscript, we propose a new…
I am most honoured to have the privilege to present the Foreword to this fascinating and wonderfully varied collection of contributions, concerning the nature of computation and of its deep connection with the operation of those basic laws,…
We revisit the idea of self-tuning the observed cosmological constant to a vanishing value and promote it to a selection criterion of brane-world models, in which our Universe is described by a 3-brane embedded in a 5d bulk. As a concrete…
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…
Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of experiments, we have made remarkably little progress towards answering the most fundamental question of: why is there a universe at…
The anthropic principle implies that life can emerge and be sustained only in a narrow range of values of fundamental constants. Here we show that anthropic arguments can set powerful constraints on {\em transient} variations of the…
It is first pointed out that there is a common mathematical model for the universe and the quantum computer. The former is called the histories approach to quantum mechanics and the latter is called measurement based quantum computation.…
Is the Universe (a spatial section thereof) finite or infinite? Knowing the global geometry of a Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre (FL) universe requires knowing both its curvature and its topology. A flat or hyperbolic (``open'') FL universe is {\em…
The fact that life has evolved in our universe constrains the laws of physics. The anthropic principle proposes that these constraints are sometimes very tight and can be used to explain in a sense the corresponding laws. Recently a…
This paper discusses the meaning and scope of biological hypercomputation (BH). The framework here is computational, and from the outset it should be clear that life is not a standard Turing Machine. Living systems hypercompute, but the…
The upper limit on what is computable in our universe is unknown, but widely believed to be set by the Turing machine -- with a function being physically computable if and only if it is Turing-computable. I show how this apparently mild…
We define a universe as the contents of a spacetime box with comoving walls, large enough to contain essentially all phenomena that can be conceivably measured. The initial time is taken as the epoch when the lowest CMB modes undergo…
I discuss some problems related to extreme mathematical realism, focusing on a recently proposed "shut-up-and-calculate" approach to physics (arXiv:0704.0646, arXiv:0709.4024). I offer arguments for a moderate alternative, the essence of…
This paper introduces foundations for a new kind of cosmology. We advocate that computer simulations are needed to address two key cosmological issues. First, the robustness of the emergence of complexity, which boils down to ask: "what…