On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Jonathan Day <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Causality forbids effects without causes Sure, but no law of logic that I know of does. > > physicists are extremely keen on causality. Well they used to be keen on causality, but not so much in the last century or so. > > I tend to assume, therefore, that causality must apply absolutely > everywhere, that if violations of the conservation of information can't > arise behind an event horizon, Information might or might not be indestructible (it probably is) but that doesn't mean there is a law of conservation of information , if there were then entropy would be conserved too but if that were true time would have no arrow. Like entropy information can grow but can't shrink. > > > > The idea I was toying with pre-supposes that most real numbers don't > exist, that there are universal constants that can be generated at > arbitrary precision but that all else is subject to the precision of one > Planck unit of spacetime. > If a prime number is so large the the computational capacity of the entire universe is insufficient to produce it then I'm not sure it makes sense to say it exists, and Euclid may have been wrong after all and there are only a finite number of primes. > > (This creates an interesting problem. If the fundamental scale of the > universe is the Planck distance, then is the universe made of bubbles? You > can't tessalate spheres, so are the spaces inside the universe or outside?) > Unfortunately we don't have a quantum theory of gravity so the very concepts of inside and outside and even before and after are not well defined at the Planck scale. > > > A computer simulation cannot handle genuinely real numbers of any kind. One of the big advantages a quantum computer has over a regular computer is that it can efficiently simulate quantum phenomenon, so if quantum mechanics can handle real numbers then a quantum computer can too. > > > So if arbitrary real values exist, then the universe is not a simulation. > It's an interesting test. > What sort of test could determine that a particular infinitely large or infinitesimally small real number had to exist for physics to behave as we observe it? > > > If the universe is an emergent phenomenon resulting from pure mathematics, That's a pretty big "if". > > then real numbers of all kinds can genuinely exist at infinite precision > even if the physics is quantized. > That seems a bit odd (or maybe a Qbit odd), why is it quantized if the underlying machinery is not? John K Clark > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
