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Be Well.
David
Reality is a computer projection: physicists
What we call reality might actually be the output of a program running on a cosmos-sized quantum computer
October 4, 2012
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Is our reality a projection of information, like the hologram image of Princess Leia projected by R2D2 in Star Wars? (Credit: Lucasfilm)
Whatever kind of reality you think you’re living in, you’re probably
wrong. The universe is a computer, and everything that goes on in it can
be explained in terms of information processing, speculates New Scientist in a special issue on What is reality?
“Quantum physics is almost phrased in terms of information processing,” says Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford. “It’s suggestive that you will find information processing at the root of everything.”
In fact, every process in the universe can be reduced to interactions
between particles that produce binary answers: yes or no, here or
there, up or down. That means nature, at its most fundamental level, is
simply the flipping of binary digits or bits, just like a computer. The
result of the myriad bit flips is manifest in what we perceive as the
ongoing arrangement, rearrangement and interaction of atoms — in other
words, reality.
According to Ed Fredkin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
if we could dig into this process we would find that the universe
follows just one law, a single information-processing rule that is all
you need to build a cosmos. In Fredkin’s view, this would be some form
of “if-then” procedure; the kind of rule used in traditional computing
to manipulate the bits held by transistors on a chip and operate the
logic gates, but this time applied to the bits of the universe.
Proving that the universe is a quantum computer is a difficult task.
Even so, there is one observation that supports the idea that the
universe is fundamentally composed of information. In 2008, the GEO 600
gravitational wave detector in Hannover, Germany, picked up an anomalous
signal suggesting that space-time is pixelated. This is exactly what
would be expected in a “holographic” universe, where 3D reality is
actually a projection of information encoded on the two-dimensional
surface of the boundary of the universe (New Scientist, 17 January 2009, p 24).
This bizarre idea arose from an argument over black holes. One of the
fundamental tenets of physics is that information cannot be destroyed,
but a black hole appears to violate this by swallowing things that
contain information then gradually evaporating away. What happens to
that information was the subject of a long debate between Stephen
Hawking and several of his peers. In the end, Hawking lost the debate,
conceding that the information is imprinted on the event horizon that
defines the black hole’s boundary and escapes as the black hole
evaporates.
This led theoretical physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard’t Hooft
to propose that the entire universe could also hold information at its
boundary — with the consequence that our reality could be the projection
of that information into the space within the boundary.
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