Related papers: Does the Universe have a Hard Drive?

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…

We argue that whether the universe is infinite or finite is less crucial than usually supposed. Paradoxes of repeating behaviour in the infinite, or eternal inflationary, universe can be alleviated by a realistic definition of differing…

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,…

I will propose the notion that the universe is digital, not as a claim about what the universe is made of but rather about the way it unfolds. Central to the argument will be the concepts of symmetry breaking and algorithmic probability,…

While quantum computers are expected to yield considerable advantages over classical devices, the precise features of quantum theory enabling these advantages remain unclear. Contextuality--the denial of a notion of classical physical…

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…

This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us…

In our previous arXiv papers ("The Information and the Matter", v1, v5; more systematically the informational conception is presented in the paper "The Information as Absolute", 2010) it was rigorously shown that Matter in our Universe -…

Tracing flows of information in our quantum Universe explains why we see the world as classical.

The problem of the determinism of Quantum Mechanics has been a main one during the 20th century. At the same time, in the context of Logic and Set Theory, the importance of ancient paradoxes as well as the appearance of many new ones, has…

When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…

A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…

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…

We address the question whether there is a fundamental reason why quantum information is more fragile than classical information. We show that some answers can be found by considering the existence of quantum memories and their dimensional…

The possibility to describe the laws of the Universe in a computational way seems to be correlated to a principle that the density of information is bounded. This principle, that is dual to that of a finite velocity of information, has…

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 notion of quantum information related to the two different perspectives of the global and local states is examined. There is circularity in the definition of quantum information because we can speak only of the information of systems…

It is proposed that the physical universe is an instance of a mathematical structure which possesses a dual structure, and that this dual structure is the collection of all possible knowledge of the physical universe. In turn, the physical…

We consider a toy model of the interaction of a qubit with an exotic space-time containing a time-like curve. Consistency seems to require that the global evolution of the qubit be non-unitary. Given that quantum mechanics is globally…

According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…