CAJ: The Simulation Theory - 6.) Glitches, flaws and errors letting us see what is really real

As elaborated in more detail in the previous post, Rich Terrell provides a good example of how we might be able to prove that we are already living in a computer simulation. 

Professor John D. Barrow

Besides him, I would like to introduce John D. Barrow a physicist and professor for mathematics and physics at the Centre for Mathematical Science at Cambridge University. He published a short paper explaining why, if we were living in a simulated reality, we might expect to see occasional glitches and small drifts in the supposed constants and laws of Nature over time.

Just as Mr. Terrell, he asks himself what the “Great Programmer” of our universe is capable of. He concludes that the simulators determine the laws and can change them; they govern the world. Further, they can engineer anthropic fine-tuning. They can shut down the simulation whenever they want to and intervene or distance themselves from their simulation. They can impose their ethical principles upon their simulated reality. And they can even watch their simulated civilizations become so powerful that they can create their own simulations. 

Mr. Barrow continues by seizing on the perceptions of Terrell. He argued that the simulators will try to avoid the complexity of using a consistent set of laws of Nature in their worlds. It will be more likely that they try to implement realistic effects to create a realistic looking result – as long as no one looks too closely. However, these limitations to complexity would cause occasional problems which might be even visible by the simulated beings. 

He says that even an advanced civilization is not capable of knowing everything about the laws of Nature. Of course they will know so much about physics and programming that they will be able to create universe simulations but these simulations will contain subtle gaps or even errors. Without any doubt the created simulations will work also with these errors. However, these flaws will gradually build up and accumulate so that eventually these realities will cease to compute.

Mr. Barrow provides a possible solution of how to correct these errors. The simulators have to fix the occurring problems one by one using error-correcting computer codes. So the simulators would use this type of temporary protection and update the working laws of Nature to include extra knowledge they had learnt since the simulation was initiated. As a result, the laws of Nature within the simulation might seem to break down every now and again. For sure, the simulated people, especially the scientists, will take notice that their constants of Nature slowly seem to change.

Basically, he argues that we might be able to find out if our reality is really real by observing these glitches or small drifts in the supposed constants and laws of Nature. He concludes saying that the flaws of Nature are therefore as important as the laws of Nature for our understanding of true reality.

Professor Silas Beane

There is also a team around Silas Beane at the University of Bonn in Germany who argue that they might have found a way to prove that we are living in a simulation. According to them it is fairly simple, all we need to do is build our own simulation of the universe and identify constraints. Like Mr. Barrow, this team of physicists says that a simulation of the universe, no matter how powerful, will still have limitations. And they would be observable by the simulated people as constraints on physical processes. 

Actually, they have already simulated the universe as an ultra-small version of it that is down to the femto-scale which is smaller than the nano-scale. They are simulating quantum chromodynamics which is the fundamental force in nature that gives rise to the strong nuclear force among protons and neutrons and to nuclei and their interactions. Further, they replace the space-time continuum with a grid consisting of tiny, tightly spaced cubic “lattices”. They believe that these kinds of simulations might be the forerunners to more powerful ones in which even humans might be generated. As for now, they only want to create accurate models of cosmological processes in order to find out which ones might represent hard limits for simulations. 

At this point I would like to mention that physicists have been creating their own computer simulations of the forces of nature for years. They create them on a very tiny scale, the size of an atomic nucleus. Therefore, they use a three-dimensional grid to model a little chunk of the universe. When they let the program run, they see what happens and in this way, they have been able to simulate the motion and collisions of elementary particles.

Coming back to the simulations of Beane and his team, they generate slight but distinct anomalies. So they asked themselves if they might be able to detect the very same anomalies in our universe. 

In their paper, they state that the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cut-off might be the indicator they are looking for. The GZK cut-off is an upper limit on the energy of cosmic rays which are high-energy particles coming to the Earth’s atmosphere from outside the solar system. They state that within their Quantum Chromodynamics Model the GZK cut-off behaves interestingly. So it might be the reveal they are waiting for to prove that we are living in a simulation. 

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/is-the-universe-a-simulation.html?_r=1&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Opinion&action=keypress&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article

http://io9.com/5950543/physicists-say-there-may-be-a-way-to-prove-that-we-live-in-a-computer-simulation

http://hinessight.blogs.com/files/living-in-a-simulated-universe.pdf