- Sep 26, 2000
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http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019912305_simulation16m.html
Living in a simulated world: UW scientists explore the theory
University of Washington physicists have come up with one way to test whether our universe is a giant computer simulation being run by our descendants.
It is entirely plausible, says University of Washington physics professor Martin Savage, that our universe and everything in it is one huge computer simulation being run by our descendants.
You, me, this newspaper, the room you're sitting in everything we think of as reality is actually being generated by vast, powerful supercomputers of the future.
If that sounds mind-blowing, Savage and his colleagues think they've come up with a way to test whether it's true.
Their paper, "Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation," has kindled a lively international discussion about the simulation argument, which was first put forth in 2003 by University of Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom.
A UW News posting explaining Savage's paper has gotten more than 100,000 page views in a week, and ignited theories about the nature of reality and consciousness, the limits on computer networks and musings about what our future selves might be like.
In the paper, the physicists propose looking for a "signature," or pattern, in our universe that also occurs in current small-scale computer simulations. One such pattern might be a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays.
"There are signatures of resource constraints in present-day simulations that are likely to exist as well in simulations in the distant future, including the imprint of an underlying lattice if one is used to model the space-time continuum," Stricherz wrote.
If our world is a computer simulation, "the highest-energy cosmic rays would not travel along the edges of the lattice in the model but would travel diagonally, and they would not interact equally in all directions as they otherwise would be expected to do."
In other words, even supercomputers capable of creating a simulation of the universe would be hobbled by finite resources, and one way we might be able to detect those limits is to look for cosmic rays that don't travel the way they would be expected to travel.
Savage and his team are theorists, not experimentalists. They're not planning to perform such a test, although other physicists have said they're interested in doing so.
Ok. Mind officially blown.
Living in a simulated world: UW scientists explore the theory
University of Washington physicists have come up with one way to test whether our universe is a giant computer simulation being run by our descendants.
It is entirely plausible, says University of Washington physics professor Martin Savage, that our universe and everything in it is one huge computer simulation being run by our descendants.
You, me, this newspaper, the room you're sitting in everything we think of as reality is actually being generated by vast, powerful supercomputers of the future.
If that sounds mind-blowing, Savage and his colleagues think they've come up with a way to test whether it's true.
Their paper, "Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation," has kindled a lively international discussion about the simulation argument, which was first put forth in 2003 by University of Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom.
A UW News posting explaining Savage's paper has gotten more than 100,000 page views in a week, and ignited theories about the nature of reality and consciousness, the limits on computer networks and musings about what our future selves might be like.
In the paper, the physicists propose looking for a "signature," or pattern, in our universe that also occurs in current small-scale computer simulations. One such pattern might be a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays.
"There are signatures of resource constraints in present-day simulations that are likely to exist as well in simulations in the distant future, including the imprint of an underlying lattice if one is used to model the space-time continuum," Stricherz wrote.
If our world is a computer simulation, "the highest-energy cosmic rays would not travel along the edges of the lattice in the model but would travel diagonally, and they would not interact equally in all directions as they otherwise would be expected to do."
In other words, even supercomputers capable of creating a simulation of the universe would be hobbled by finite resources, and one way we might be able to detect those limits is to look for cosmic rays that don't travel the way they would be expected to travel.
Savage and his team are theorists, not experimentalists. They're not planning to perform such a test, although other physicists have said they're interested in doing so.
Ok. Mind officially blown.
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