The universe as a giant computer
One thing that is mentioned in “The Singularity is Near” is the theory that universe is ultimately a piece of software. This is a theory fist proposed by Edward Fredkin in the 1980s. If you look at physics as basically an information process, with all interactions really just changing the “information” in different elements (such as their spin, charge, etc.), then universe is full of an enormous amount of information and is performing an incredible number of calculations all the time. Of course, “there is no shortcut to finding out what… [the program] …will lead to.”
Here’s a quote from Robert Wright talking about Fredkin:
“Fredkin believes the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places.”
It’s certainly an interesting idea, it was also mentioned at the EDGE talk I went to last week by Seth Lloyd (he’s releasing a a book on this soon). But it makes you wonder, “what is the universe calculating?”, “why is it calculating it?”, “who designed/programmed the universe?”
June 20th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
Interesting, sounds sort of similar to the idea in the Hitchhiker’s guide series that the earth is just a big computer, and the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything, is 42.
November 8th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
[…] In this talk, Seth Lloyd talks about the universe as a giant computer and the implications of that notion. As I’ve described before, the universe is a giant computer because all of the atoms and molecules in the world represent information through their various qualities such as spin, etc. Every interaction between atoms or molecules is, in fact, a computation. Since the universe is infinite, this giant computer will compute everything possibly computable. Since a computer can simulate any other computer, this includes computing more computers. Namely, us. As the universe computes all possible computations, some of this create increasing complexity, eventually leading to bacteria, animals, humans, and the computers we have today. […]