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The idea that the universe is a digital computation device
Digital physics is a speculative idea that the
universe can be conceived of as a vast, digital computation device, or as the output of a
deterministic or
probabilistic
computer program .
[1] The hypothesis that the universe is a
digital computer was proposed by
Konrad Zuse in his 1969 book
Rechnender Raum
[2] ("Calculating-space ").
[3] The term digital physics was coined in 1978 by
Edward Fredkin ,
[4] who later came to prefer the term digital philosophy .
[5] Fredkin encouraged the creation of a digital physics group at what was then
MIT 's
Laboratory for Computer Science , with
Tommaso Toffoli and
Norman Margolus as primary figures.
Digital physics suggests that there exists, at least in principle, a
program for a
universal computer that computes the
evolution of the
universe . The computer could be, for example, a huge
cellular automaton .
[1]
[6]
Extant models of digital physics appear incompatible with the existence of several continuous characters of physical
symmetries ,
[7] e.g.,
rotational symmetry ,
translational symmetry ,
Lorentz symmetry , and the
Lie group gauge invariance of
Yang–Mills theories , all central to current physical theory. Moreover, extant models of digital physics violate various well-established features of
quantum physics , belonging to the class of theories with local
hidden variables that have so far been ruled out experimentally by physicists using
Bell's theorem .
[8]
[9]
However, covariant discrete theories can be formulated that preserve the aforementioned symmetries.
[10]
[11]
See also
References
^
a
b Schmidhuber, Jürgen (1997), Freksa, Christian; Jantzen, Matthias; Valk, Rüdiger (eds.),
"A computer scientist's view of life, the universe, and everything" , Foundations of Computer Science: Potential — Theory — Cognition , Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1337, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 201–208,
arXiv :
quant-ph/9904050 ,
doi :
10.1007/bfb0052088 ,
ISBN
978-3-540-69640-7 ,
S2CID
17830241 , retrieved 2022-05-23
^
"Das Jahr des rechnenden Raums" . blog.hnf.de (in German). Retrieved 2022-05-23 .
^ Zuse, Konrad (1969). Rechnender Raum . Braunschweig:
Springer Vieweg .
ISBN
978-3-663-02723-2 .
^
6.895 Digital Physics Lecture Outline , MIT Course Catalog Listing, 1978 (PDF)
^
"Digital Philosophy | A New Way of Thinking About Physics" . digitalphilosophy.org . Archived from
the original on 2021-01-26.
^ Zuse, Konrad, 1967, Elektronische Datenverarbeitung vol 8., pages 336–344
^ Fritz, Tobias (June 2013).
"Velocity polytopes of periodic graphs and a no-go theorem for digital physics" . Discrete Mathematics . 313 (12): 1289–1301.
arXiv :
1109.1963 .
doi :
10.1016/j.disc.2013.02.010 .
^ Aaronson, Scott (2014).
"Quantum randomness: if there's no predeterminism in quantum mechanics, can it output numbers that truly have no pattern?" . American Scientist . 102 (4): 266–271.
doi :
10.1511/2014.109.266 .
^ Jaeger, Gregg (2018). "Clockwork Rebooted: Is the Universe a Computer?". Quantum Foundations, Probability and Information . STEAM-H: Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Mathematics & Health. pp. 71–91.
doi :
10.1007/978-3-319-74971-6_8 .
ISBN
978-3-319-74970-9 .
^ D'Ambrosio, Fabio (Feb 2019).
"A Noether Theorem for discrete Covariant Mechanics" (PDF) .
arXiv :
1902.08997 .
^ Grimmer, Daniel (May 2022).
"A Discrete Analog of General Covariance -- Part 2: Despite what you've heard, a perfectly Lorentzian lattice theory" (PDF) .
arXiv :
2205.07701 .
Further reading