CAJ: Simulation Theory - 5.) How Mr. Rich Terrell rocked my CAJ

When talking about the universe as a computer simulation, people might get curious about how to find out if this theory is actually true. Is there any chance to distinguish fake from true realities? 

To start off this topic, let me introduce you to Rich Terrell, the man who really rocked my CAJ.

Rich Terrell

Rich Terrell is a physicist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and adheres to the idea that our universe is a simulation. Some people might argue that he is crazy to believe in such a farfetched theory but first let me prove that this man is not insane. He has helped design missions to Mars, discovered four new moons around Saturn, Neptune and Uranus and taken pictures of the distant solar system. I believe that this man is quite intelligent and that his words can be taken seriously. So from my point of view, I think that what I am presenting to you in the next paragraphs really is worth to be taken into account.

Many people on Earth believe that there has to be a creator, for most of them it is a God, who created our universe. Thus, Rich Terrell asked himself the question which requirements a God has to fulfill. He concluded that a God is an interdimensional being, connected with everything in die universe and a creator responsible for the universe and in some way he is capable of changing the laws of physics. These characteristics sound familiar when looking at the things programmers are able to perform when creating simulated environments. If we now suppose that our civilization will eventually achieve a state of enough computing power to create a universe, our civilization would fulfill all requirements we put on God. Consequently, we could become God. 

The next interesting thought he brings forward is based on a mental experiment. Imagine a box with a human brain and a laptop (could be any kind of computer) inside. Both are approximately of the same weigh, volume and power. Now close the box so that you cannot see the two items any more. What would happen if we asked the human brain and the laptop a question and could not tell if either the brain or the laptop would be answering? To me, his reasoning seems logical that if we are not able to tell the difference the human brain and the computer are qualitatively equivalent. Further, if we believe that a human being is consciously aware, we must also argue that a computer has the same qualities.

Mr. Terrell thinks that he has found evidence in nature to prove the idea that we might be living already living in a computer simulation.
Let me give a brief explanation of what he is trying to say. If we are looking at a simulation we can see all aspects of it clearly from a distance. Let us now zoom in. We will detect that the picture we have been seeing clearly all along breaks down into pixels when we get close enough.
Now he draws a comparison to the real word because that is exactly the same thing what is happening in our universe. Physicists have discovered that matter is made of tiny little pixels which are fundamental, indivisible particles which are billions of times smaller than an atom. Quantum mechanics is the theory that explains this phenomenon and shows that it does not solely apply to matter but also to the entire universe. If we look at the way the universe behaves, we see that it is quantized, that it is made of pixels and that it is made of individual atoms.
Quantum mechanics states that space, time and energy is quantized which means that everything is made of pixels which further means that the universe has a finite number of components or in other words, a finite number of states. Therefore, it is computable. It suggests that everything we can see could really be produced by lines of code inside a powerful computer. 

Finally, this last point presented by Mr. Terrell is the one thing that really blew my mind. With a simple and actually very old experiment, called the Davisson-Germer-Experiment, dating back to the year 1927, Terrell explains the similarity between the way matter behaves and the way a simulation would work.
In general, the experiment consists of a gun which fires electrons at a target of graphite atoms and a collecting screen to record how they ricochet off.

If this apparatus would be scaled up a billion times and if the gun fired real bullets, the pattern on the collection screen would be completely random.
However, in the scaled down subatomic world the electron ricochets are not random. The pattern you can see on the screen reflects the pattern of atoms in the target. So it seems like each electron senses where every atom in the graphite is even though the target is much bigger than it. It looks like the electrons are not got but spread out and so they form this diffraction pattern.
This experiment shows that matter behaves when you are measuring it as individual particles. Nevertheless, as soon as you are not measuring it anymore, matter is diffuse and spreads out so that it does not have a finite from in the universe.
These basic rules of quantum mechanics apply to all tiny subatomic particles. When we take a look at them they are dots and when we look away they lose their physical form.
You may wonder what this experiment has to do with the simulation theory. So here is what Mr. Terrell said. A different way of looking at this outcome is to see how parallel this behavior is with what we can observe in a PlayStation3, for example, while playing a video game. Let us take the example of SimCity which is an enormous city where I can navigate my way through every bit of it because the video game provides me with the frame I need when I’m looking at a particular scenery. When I look somewhere else it provides me with this frame.
In a strange way, our universe might behave in the same way. It gives me exactly what I need to see when I look at something. When I stop looking at it, it is not necessarily there. So it is possible to argue that our world might be already a simulation as the universe is pixelated and only gets into a definite form when observed. That is the exact same way in which a computer simulation behaves.

Honestly, how amazing is that?!

source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ucqYJzK1rk&index=3&list=PL093A8AA11264F3CA