9 ms·
The frame rate of the universe (2009)
- jdmoreira 6y agoMy physics almost stopped at Newton but I liked the article because it resonates with some thoughts I had about Zeno's arrow paradox - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Arrow_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Arrow_parad... What if space is discrete and time is also discrete? Then there is no paradox. It disappears. I find the possibility that the Universe computes in `ticks` and space is discrete to be very soothing and I'm sure it has nothing to do with me liking computers :)
- gzalo 6y agoSome years ago, when learning about quantum mechanics, and how you could find a particle inside a forbidden region, I connected that with physics engines in games (and how computing them not fast enough can cause things to intersect in odd ways), and I had this idea: What if time flows in discrete steps, but the `ticks` aren't uniformly separated? For example, they could be distributed probabilistically as a Poisson distribution. In that case, a particle hitting a potential barrier could pass it briefly, until the tick happens and it moves out of it. There might be a way to compute an optimal probability distribution for that case, but I'm not sure if it could be consistent with Schrödinger equation. But I never had time nor knowledge to search whether someone had already thought of it, or if it could be even remotely plausible.
- _def 6y agoI now have even more respect towards speedrunners and glitch hunters than I already had. They are like scientists of fictional universes!
- jonsen 6y ago> ...whether someone had already thought of it Stephen Wolfram certainly did in A New Kind of Science: https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-9--fundamental-physics/ https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-9--fundamental-physi... And Louis Nielsen: https://www.rostra.dk/louis/ https://www.rostra.dk/louis/ And probably many others.
- PUSH_AX 6y ago> Some years ago, when learning about quantum mechanics, and how you could find a particle inside a forbidden region Where can I learn more about this? It sounds interesting.
- gzalo 6y agoThe classical simplest "problem" is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectangular_potential_barrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectangular_potential_barrier And the actual quantum phenomenon is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling
- matthewfcarlson 6y agoI took a creative writing class at University (mostly on a whim). One of the stories I proof-read was a novel about this idea. That the universe didn't tick at a uniform rate and there were people who could "tick" faster or slow. Of course, you run into all sorts of people with breathing and moving through very hard air. The core tenet of the book was that the clock domains of the universe were drifting apart at an accelerated rate and the protagonists were trying to stop it. It was an interesting concept and a fun short story.
- benibela 6y ago>core tenet of the book was that the clock domains of the universe were drifting apart at an accelerated rate and the protagonists were trying to stop it. Another idea would be to have the clocks running backwards.
- CodexArcanum 6y agoThere's a theory on how the universe is structured that instead of space-time being like a uniform grid, a Cartesian space, that space-time is made up of nodes which are linked together. I guess kind of like a voronoi diagram in 4 dimensions. I wish I could remember the name of those theories. If space-time is packed together in most places, then it might resemble a grid to us. This model works in a lot of interesting ways too: wormholes are just links between two otherwise unconnected regions, the curvature of ST can vary depending on the region, and time can flow at varying rates depending on how "dense with time" an area is. One thing I like about it is that Planck units kind of just represent a minimal distance between nodes (indeed, the connections between nodes defines "distance" and "duration") and everything else just falls out of the geometry of this ST graph.
- pfraze 6y agoA few years ago, I saw a proposal for multiplayer games which suggested that the time passage between ticks vary depending on how many users are playing within a close space, to help deal with the increased network load. This is something that Eve Online does, but it segments its game-space into discrete sectors and therefore it slows down time uniformly in these sectors. This proposal was to do the same, but variably within one contiguous gamespace, meaning players would observe each other “slowing down.” This seemed interesting to me because, well, what on earth would it do to your game physics to have varying time passage between ticks depending on your position in space? So I rigged up a simple simulation of 2 points connected by a spring force (a “body”), gave them an initial velocity, and set the tick to slow down linearly according to distance from a “center.” The end result was that the body orbited around the center. The varying time passage meant that the spring force’s effect on the point masses would be reduced for the points in the slower tick speed. So it seems like you can create a kind of “gravity” by bending time but not space. Here’s a link to the sim: https://pfrazee.github.io/gsim/ https://pfrazee.github.io/gsim/
- ardit33 6y agoWe have already that. Thats time dilation due to gravity! In places/spaces with larger mass (aka stuff), time flows slower....
- pfraze 6y agoYeah the thing I find interesting is this works by only bending time, whereas I understand gravity to involve bending space as well.
- yencabulator 6y ago"Does Time Cause Gravity?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKxQTvqcpSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKxQTvqcpSg
- worker767424 6y ago> If we want to fit the universe into a box, its sides would have to be twice that size. That is 5.4 × 10^61 Planck lengths. 206 bits is enough to address the precise position of anything in the universe.
- dry_soup 6y agoWouldn't it be that times three, one for each dimension?
- logologology 6y agocare to explain this one? edit: right its log(2, 5.4*10^61). Its been a long morning...
- Causality1 6y agoTo me a neat consequence of quantized motion and dimensional extent is that there's a hard limit on angular orientation and hence accuracy. That is to say, it's possible to be far enough away and in a proper position such that a particle in another certain position could not be propelled directly at you, only at positions around you since you could be standing in the middle of the maximum angular resolution of the propelling force.
- UnFleshedOne 6y agoDoesn't that require global absolute fixed grid?
- CodexArcanum 6y agoWow, I had never considered this! Although, as "UnFleshedOne" points out, that would imply a fixed geometry (not necessarily a grid) wouldn't it? We don't know that angles are limited within a "Planck volume," so they could be continuous (not that anything else seems to be!) If this were true though, I'd think it would give us a fascinating tool!
- tutfbhuf 6y agoHe did the monster math and calculated that the frame rate of the universe is 18 septillion FPS. Let's assume we are already in a game running with this FPS. Could we somehow prove that it's actually a simulation or disprove in the case it's not?
- kempbellt 6y agoDepends... Are we running in a simulation that has a specific FPS target cap, or is that the "hardware limit"? Maybe the universe will discretely lower the resolution of rocks on Mars to increase FPS for localized users on Earth that it knows are testing such theories.
- alexvoda 6y agoWhat if the reason we have not received alien signals is because the universe outside of the solar system has a much lower resolution. If we are living in a simulation and the goal of the experiment is to study a living civilization it may be unecesary for the experiment to simulate other civilizations if travel between the two is impossible.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoI think a more interesting question is: would it matter if it were?
- joshualedbetter 6y agoImagine a robot trying to argue that it doesn't if they live in Westworld; I mean, the robot bar tender still has to tend bar. Imagine Truman trying to convince himself that it doesn't matter if he's in a TV show or not. Their arguments, no matter how clever, would be absurd when looking in from the outside. If there's a high probability that the simulation hypothesis is true, it seems clinically insane to believe that it doesn't matter.
- industriousthou 6y ago
- rbanffy 6y agoKind of on the same vibe, you can think of the speed of light as the bandwidth of spacetime.
- pkt_nspktr 6y agoI recall a blog post or article posted several years ago, somewhere, that discussed the networking consequences of lightspeed being an upper bound for bandwidth. Unfortunately "lightspeed networking" is not a unique search term! Does this ring a bell with anyone and does anyone have a link to that article?
- the_only_law 6y agoI can't recall any specific article, but I recall reading about how it could complicate interplanetary communication if we ever colonized another planet.
- pkt_nspktr 6y agoTangential to my original question, but as I was trying to track down the article I remembered, I re-discovered Paul Krugman's Theory of Interstellar Trade[1], written in 1978 which discusses the economics of shipping goods at near-light speed. [1] http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/interstellar.pdf http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/interstellar.pdf
- zzzeek 6y agoPratchett would have then said, each of these frames is an entirely new universe, the previous one being destroyed. "And they are told: 'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.'" https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/46982-thief-of-time https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/46982-thief-of-time
- andrei_says_ 6y agoThis is now my favorite quote. The Big Bang is an ongoing event. Surprise is the state of yoga.
- tupshin 6y agoThe universe is best modeled with substructural linear logic, so makes sense.
- xelxebar 6y agoFor those interested, the "3D projection of a 2D surface" that the author mentions is more formally called AdS-CFT Correspondence[0]. The AdS stands for "Anti-de Sitter spaces" and CFT for "Conformal Field Theories". This finds that the "surface" of the former looks like an example of the latter. Man, the author has stumbled onto such a cool bit of physics/math. Wish I could ramble on about it more, but I'm about to head to work. Hopefully, someone else can elaborate! [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence
- bob1029 6y ago> It's still fascinating to think of the universe as a computer simulation. Modern physics make it seem more like a video game than ever. The double slit experiment is all I needed to see to become fairly convinced that the universe is a simulation. I view it as a race condition in our physics.
- agumonkey 6y agoFunny I never linked the two, to me the duality was mostly a hint that 'atomicism' is an anthropologic projection of our brain onto matter.. we need to find limits and boundaries instead of infinite fields waving around.
- gunn 6y agoSo what does the non-simulated "real" or "outer-world" look like in this view?
- edem 6y agoThis somehow reminds me of [That Alien Message][0] from Less Wrong. Worth a read! [0]:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...
- t0mbstone 6y agoI've often wondered if the speed of light was somehow related to the computation cycles per second of our universe. For example, imagine if the universe was made of a three dimensional fabric of tiny pixels, and the only way information could move to another adjacent pixel was one universe calculation at a time. So when something without mass is moving across a field of pixels, its speed is capped by the number of universe calculations happening per second.
- yetihehe 6y agoThere are such theories, even with mass requiring more calculations. So when there is mass nearby, you need to make more calculations, which slows down that speed in that place. Slowing down speed in medium typically provides refraction/bending of light, so maybe bending of path of light/mass (aka gravity) is due to computational complexity.
- Viliam1234 6y agoHow would you propagate information in a 3D pixel array so that it would move at the same speed (and generally, everything would behave identically) in any direction?
- xkvhs 6y agoLike Conway's game of life. Time and distance are the same thing. On a chess board, it takes a King 7 moves to reach the other end of the board, regardless how long it takes someone to make that move, or how big chess board is - from King's pov its all the same. Also heard somewhere "speed of causality". There must be some good argument for why it couldn't have been any other way.
- Viliam1234 6y agoI meant, how to make the calculation so that the speed is the same in horizontal and diagonal direction. Imagine a chessboard where every square is 1 meter wide. When the king moves horizontally, his speed is 1 meter per turn. When he moves diagonally, his speed is 1.4 meter per turn. How would you define the rules so that the speed is same in all angles? (Not just 0 and 45 degrees, but also e.g. 13 degrees.) Can you make in Conway's game of life an expanding circle that remains circular at large scale (and doesn't become e.g. some kind of octagon)? In our universe all directions are equivalent. If you fly in a rocket, you can't distinguish between moving horizontally or diagonally according to some hypothetical absolute coordinates of the universe. (The theory of relativity is based on the assumption that there is no such thing as absolute coordinates, not even the coordinate of time!) Which makes me suspect the models that assume the existence of some absolute coordinates (such as a 3D grid of Planck-sized cubes).
- foxes 6y agoThere is no evidence the Planck length is the smallest possible length in the universe, a pop sci misconception. It is the length at which quantum effects dominate the structure of space time, ie "quantum foam". It is perhaps the smallest measurable distance according to some calculations. Most experimental evidence indicates space is continuous.