Related papers: A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe,…
The idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our universe appears to be…
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…
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…
I review the basis and limitations of plausible inference in cosmology, in particular the limitation that it can only provide fundamentally true inferences when the hypotheses under consideration form a set that is exhaustive. They never…
Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a…
The probability distribution P from which the history of our universe is sampled represents a theory of everything or TOE. We assume P is formally describable. Since most (uncountably many) distributions are not, this imposes a strong…
If the topology of the universe is compact we show how it significantly changes our assessment of the naturalness of the observed structure of the universe and the likelihood of its present state of high isotropy and near flatness arising…
Kolmogorov complexity is the length of the ultimately compressed version of a file (that is, anything which can be put in a computer). Formally, it is the length of a shortest program from which the file can be reconstructed. We discuss the…
Computation, the use of a computer to solve, simulate, or visualize a physical problem, has revolutionized how physics research is done. Computation is used widely to model systems, to simulate experiments, and to analyze data. Yet, in most…
The extent to which the benefits of science can be fully realized depends critically upon the quality of the connection between researchers themselves and between researchers and members of the public. We believe that it is now possible to…
The mathematical universe discussed here gives models of possible structures our physical universe can have.
Kolmogorov Complexity constitutes an integral part of computability theory, information theory, and computational complexity theory -- in the discrete setting of bits and Turing machines. Over real numbers, on the other hand, the…
It is now generally believed that our observable universe is one amongst a very large number - may be $10^{500}$ - of parallel universes. Following the author's own model in this context, we argue that this conglomeration of universes…
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…
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 being based on two…
This paper examines whether unitary evolution alone is sufficient to explain emergence of the classical world from the perspective of computability theory. Specifically, it looks at the problem of how the choice related to the measurement…
An approach to modelling the universe based on the requisites of gravitational energy. This model is explained as it relates to the stages of the universal life cycle and the continued existence of the universe as it is known today. The…
In this paper we work out a multiverse scenario whose physical characteristics enable us to advance the following the conjecture that whereas the physics of particles and fields is confined to live in the realm of the whole multiverse…
Many cosmological models assume or imply that the total size of the universe is very large, perhaps even infinite. Here we argue instead that the universe might be comparatively small, in fact not much larger than the currently observed…
We discuss various universality aspects of numerical computations using standard algorithms. These aspects include empirical observations and rigorous results. We also make various speculations about computation in a broader sense.