Related papers: Does the Universe have a Hard Drive?
An intense effort is being made today to build a quantum computer. Instead of presenting what has been achieved, I invoke here analogies from the history of science in an attempt to glimpse what the future might hold. Quantum computing is…
We revisit the vexed question of how unpredictability can arise in a deterministic universe, focusing on unitary quantum theory. We discuss why quantum unpredictability is irrelevant for the possibility of what some people call `free-will',…
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between…
Niels Bohr wrote: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature." In an…
Thirty years ago, John Preskill concluded "that the information loss paradox may well presage a revolution in fundamental physics" and mused that "Conceivably, the puzzle of black hole evaporation portends a scientific revolution as…
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…
The implications of the physical theory of quantum mechanics on the question of realism is much a subject of sustaining interest, while the background questions among physicists on how to think about all the theoretical notion and…
This article introduces Universal Quantum Relativity which is a simple Theory of Everything. It relies on an ultimate doctrine that is the absence of absolute existence. This generalizes relativity principles up to a mother quantum theory.…
Quantum mechanics is a fundamentally probabilistic theory (at least so far as the empirical predictions are concerned). It follows that, if one wants to properly understand quantum mechanics, it is essential to clearly understand the…
The descriptions of the quantum realm and the macroscopic classical world differ significantly not only in their mathematical formulations but also in their foundational concepts and philosophical consequences. When and how physical systems…
So far, none of attempts to quantize gravity has led to a satisfactory model that not only describe gravity in the realm of a quantum world, but also its relation to elementary particles and other fundamental forces. Here, we outline the…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
Based on a number of experimentally verified physical observations, it is argued that the standard principles of quantum mechanics should be applied to the Universe as a whole. Thus, a paradigm is proposed in which the entire Universe is…
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…
In the Bayesian approach to probability theory, probability quantifies a degree of belief for a single trial, without any a priori connection to limiting frequencies. In this paper we show that, despite being prescribed by a fundamental…
We propose a resolution to the black-hole information-loss paradox: in one formulation of physical theory, information is preserved and macroscopic causality is violated; in another, causality is preserved and pure states evolve to mixed…
Quantum Mechanics is generally considered to be the ultimate theory capable of explaining the emergence of randomness by virtue of the quantum measurement process. Therefore, Quantum Mechanics can be thought of as God's wonderfully…
General relativity treats spacetime as dynamical and exhibits its breakdown at singularities. This failure is interpreted as evidence that quantum gravity is not a theory formulated within spacetime; instead, it must explain the very…
General relativity is a background-independent theory of a dynamical classical spacetime geometry. Quantum theory is formulated in a classical spacetime, as an intrinsically probabilistic, contextual theory of non-classical, interfering…
My 2018 lecture at the ICA workshop in Singapore dealt with quantum computation as a meeting point of the laws of computation and the laws of quantum mechanics. We described a computational complexity argument against the feasibility of…