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Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?
The popular film trilogy, The Matrix, presented a cyberuniverse where humans live in a simulated reality created by sentient machines.
Now, a philosopher and team of physicists imagine that we might really be living inside a computer-generated universe that you could call The Lattice. What’s more, we may be able to detect it.
In 2003, British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper that proposed the universe we live in might in fact really be a numerical computer simulation. To give this a bizarre Twilight Zone twist, he suggested that our far-evolved distant descendants might construct such a program to simulate the past and recreate how their remote ancestors lived.
He felt that such an experiment was inevitable for a supercivilization. If it didn’t happen by now, then in meant that humanity never evolved that far and we’re doomed to a short lifespan as a species, he argued.
To extrapolate further, I’d suggest that artificial intelligent entities descended from us would be curious about looking back in time by simulating the universe of their biological ancestors.
As off-the-wall as this sounds, a team of physicists at the University of Washington (UW) recently announced that there is a potential test to seen if we actually live in The Lattice. Ironically, it would be the first such observation for scientifically hypothesized evidence of intelligent design behind the cosmos.
The UW team too propose that super-intelligent entities, bored with their current universe, do numerical simulations to explore all possibilities in the landscape of the underlying quantum vacuum (from which the big bang percolated) through universe simulations. “This is perhaps the most profound quest that can be undertaken by a sentient being,” write the authors.
Before you dismiss this idea as completely loony, the reality of such a Sim Universe might solve a lot of eerie mysteries about the cosmos. About two-dozen of the universe’s fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life. At first glance it seems as unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip. Jiggle these parameters and life as we know it would have never appeared. Not even stars and galaxies. This is called the Anthropic principle.
ANALYSIS: Building the Universe Inside a Supercomputer
The discovery of dark energy over a decade ago further compounds the universe’s strangeness. This sort of “antigravity” pushing space-time apart is the closest thing there is to nothing and still is something. This energy from the vacuum of space is 60 orders of magnitude weaker that what would be predicted by quantum physics.The eminent cosmologist Michael Turner ranks dark energy as “the most profound mystery in all of science.”
We are also living at a very special time in the universe’s history where it switched gears from decelerating to accelerating under the push of dark energy. This begs the question “why me why now?” (A phrase popularly attributed to Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 when she was attacked and crippled by an opponent.)
If dark energy were slightly stronger the universe would have blown apart before stars formed. Any weaker and the universe would have imploded long ago. Its incredibly anemic value has been seen as circumstantial evidence for parallel universes with their own flavor of dark energy that is typically destructive. It’s as if our universe won the lottery and got all the physical parameters just right for us to exist.
Finally, an artificial universe solves the Fermi Paradox (where are all the space aliens?) by implying that we truly are alone in the universe. It was custom made for us by our far-future progeny.
Biblical creationists can no doubt embrace these seeming cosmic coincidences as unequivocal evidence for their “theory” of Intelligent Design (ID). But is our “God” really a computer programmer rather than a bearded old man living in the sky?
Currently, supercomputers using a impressive-sounding technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics, and starting from the fundamental physical laws, can simulate only a very small portion of the universe. The scale is a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, according UW physicist Martin Savage. Mega-computers of the far future could greatly expand the size of the Sim Universe.
ANALYSIS: Artificial Universe Created Inside a Supercomputer
If we are living in such a program, there could be telltale evidence for the underlying lattice used in modeling the space-time continuum, say the researchers. This signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays. They would travel diagonally across the model universe and not interact equally in all directions, as they otherwise would be expected to do according to present cosmology.
If such results were measured, physicists would have to rule out any and all other natural explanations for the anomaly before flirting with the idea of intelligent design. (To avoid confusion with the purely faith-based creationist ID, this would not prove the existence of a biblical God, because you’d have to ask the question “why does God need a lattice?”)
If our universe is a simulation, then those entities controlling it could be running other simulations as well to create other universes parallel to our own. No doubt this would call for, ahem, massive parallel processing.
If all of this isn’t mind-blowing enough, Bostrom imagined “stacked” levels of reality, “we would have to suspect that the post-humans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Here may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time.”
To compound this even further, Bostrom imagined a hierarchy of deities, “In some ways, the post-humans running a simulation are like gods. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.”
If the parallel universes are all running on the same computer platform could we communicate with them? If so, I hope the Matrix’s manic Agent Smith doesn’t materialize one day.
To borrow from the title of Isaac Asimov’s novel I Robot, the human condition might be described as I Subroutine.
Universe Grows Like a Giant Brain
The universe may grow like a giant brain, according to a new computer simulation.
Image: A fundamental law of nature may govern the growth of brain networks, social networks, and the expansion of the Universe, a new computer simulation suggests Credit: WGBH Educational Foundation
The results, published Nov.16 in the journal Nature’s Scientific Reports, suggest that some undiscovered, fundamental laws may govern the growth of systems large and small, from the electrical firing between brain cells and growth of social networks to the expansion of galaxies.
“Natural growth dynamics are the same for different real networks, like the Internet or the brain or social networks,” said study co-author Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at the University of California San Diego.
The new study suggests a single fundamental law of nature may govern these networks, said physicist Kevin Bassler of the University of Houston, who was not involved in the study.
“At first blush they seem to be quite different systems, the question is, is there some kind of controlling laws can describe them?”.
By raising this question, “their work really makes a pretty important contribution,” he said.
Similar Networks
Past studies showed brain circuits and the Internet look a lot alike. But despite finding this functional similarity, nobody had developed equations to perfectly predict how computer networks, brain circuits or social networks grow over time, Krioukov said.
Using Einstein’s equations of relativity, which explain how matter warps the fabric of space-time, physicists can retrace the universe’s explosive birth in the Big Bang roughly 14 billion years ago and how it has expanded outward in the eons since.
So Krioukov’s team wondered whether the universe’s accelerating growth could provide insight into the ways social networks or brain circuits expand.
Brain cells and galaxies
The team created a computer simulation that broke the early universe into the tiniest possible units — quanta of space-time more miniscule than subatomic particles. The simulation linked any quanta, or nodes in a massive celestial network, that were causally related. (Nothing travels faster than light, so if a person hits a baseball on Earth, the ripple effects of that event could never reach an alien in a distant galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, meaning those two regions of space-time aren’t causally related.)
As the simulation progressed, it added more and more space-time to the history of the universe, and so its “network” connections between matter in galaxies, grew as well, Krioukov said.
When the team compared the universe’s history with growth of social networks and brain circuits, they found all the networks expanded in similar ways: They balanced links between similar nodes with ones that already had many connections. For instance, a cat lover surfing the Internet may visit mega-sites such as Google or Yahoo, but will also browse cat fancier websites or YouTube kitten videos. In the same way, neighboring brain cells like to connect, but neurons also link to such “Google brain cells” that are hooked up to loads of other brain cells.
The eerie similarity between networks large and small is unlikely to be a coincidence, Krioukov said.
“For a physicist it’s an immediate signal that there is some missing understanding of how nature works,” Krioukov said.
It’s more likely that some unknown law governs the way networks grow and change, from the smallest brain cells to the growth of mega-galaxies, Krioukov said.
“This result suggests that maybe we should start looking for it,” Krioukov told LiveScience.
Artificial Universe Similar to Ours Built with Supercomputer
Building a universe from scratch that brims with galaxies resembling those around us is now possible on supercomputers for the first time, researchers say.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy with a broad disk and outstretched arms, as are many in our cosmic neighborhood, such as Andromeda, the Pinwheel and the Whirlpool galaxies. Spiral galaxies are common, but past computer models that aimed to accurately simulate the birth and evolution of the universe over billions of years had trouble creating them. Instead, they often generated lots of blobby galaxies clumped into balls.
New computer simulations can now recreate the kind of galactic communities seen in our universe, starting with the observed afterglow of the Big Bang and evolving forward in time. Harvard’s Odyssey supercomputer allowed simulations that compressed nearly 14 billion years into only a few months.
“We’ve created the full variety of galaxies we see in the local universe,” said study author Mark Vogelsberger at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Credit: Fiona Harrison/Caltech
A supercomputer model of a rapidly-spinning, core-collapse supernova. NuSTAR observations of actual supernova remnants will provide vital data for such models and help explain how massive supernovas manage to explode.
Video Simulation Of NASA’s “Curiosity” Mission To Mars
Here’s a cool 3D animated sequence detailing how events would likely unfold as “Curiosity” descends upon red planet Mars.
Mars500 Astronaut Diego Urbina Takes “Marswalk”
Mars500 astronaut Diego Urbina treks across simulated Martian terrain. Urbina is carrying a tool originally designed for Soviet manned lunar missions in the 1960s and 1970s that never came to pass.
Credit: ESA
Our Eventual Fate: Milky Way & Andromeda Galactic Collision
Shown above; a sped up simulation of what will occur billions of years from now when the Andromeda and Milky Way merge to form an entirely new galaxy.
The Andromeda–Milky Way collision is a predicted galaxy collision that could possibly take place in approximately 3 to 5 billion years’ time between the two largest galaxies in the Local Group—the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way, which contains Earth.
What’s Inside a Black Hole?
A Thrill Ride to ‘the Other Side of Infinity’
Video game technology and Einstein’s work on relativity may at first seem as unlikely a couple as Oscar and Felix.
But to Andrew J. S. Hamilton, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado, they are perfect together.
What gamer programs do with increasing speed, sophistication and computational muscle, Dr. Hamilton said, is visualize things that have never been seen in the real world. And what Einstein described, especially in his theory of general relativity, are forces of time and space literally outside the real world we know, or can know.
“What if you could take people through a wormhole the way Einstein’s equations said it would be?” he said in interview in his office on the Boulder campus. “And what if you could bring art and science together in a way that compromised neither?”
That is where black holes come in. Dr. Hamilton’s marriage of video game software and relativity, which he has fashioned into a “Black Hole Flight Simulator,” is at the heart of a new show at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science that takes viewers on a 23-minute thrill ride to what the program notes call “the other side of infinity.”
Groupthink Not a Problem in Simulated Mars Mission
Getting along with your fellow astronauts can be dangerous. Too much consensus — what some psychologists call “groupthink” — can keep crews from being creative in a crisis. But a new study found that six “cosmonauts” on a simulated Mars mission emerged from 105 days in a replica spacecraft with their quirks intact.
The study was the first to directly tackle the possible downside of harmony, rather than antagonism, in a space mission.
“Earlier, we had been focusing on how tension increases over time,” said social psychologist Gro Sandal of the University of Bergen in Norway, lead author of a paper to be published in Acta Astronautica. “This paper has more or less the opposite focus: whether people start to think more and more similar while they are isolated.”
Groupthink is still a controversial concept: Not all social psychologists think it exists. But those who believe in it think it tends to happen when people isolated in an extreme situation — a war zone, for instance, or a ship in the Arctic — start thinking in lockstep and avoiding outward disagreement. Groupthinkers also often feel like they’re united against a common enemy — on a space mission, this could be Mission Control.
“The worst case scenario is … there may be a microculture within the crew that evolves, and the crew starts having values that deviate to a large extent from values on Earth,” Sandal said.
Sandal and colleagues monitored six pretend cosmonauts in a pilot study for the Mars500 project, an ongoing simulated space mission being held at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. From March 31 to July 14, 2009, two Russian cosmonauts, a Russian medical doctor and sports physiologist, a mechanical engineer in the German army, and a French airline pilot lived and worked as if they were on a real space station.
The Milky Way Colliding with the Andromeda Galaxy (simulation video)
*ignore the shitty quality of the gifThe Andromeda galaxy, our closest galactic neighbor and the largest galaxy in our region of the universe, is hurling toward the Milky Way at 300,000 miles per hour — almost 100 times faster than a speeding bullet. Why? Gravity. The two galaxies are close enough together to be pulled together by the force of gravity.
In approximately three billion years, a collision between the two galaxies will occur, creating an elliptical galaxy (our galaxy is currently a spiral), and the largest galaxy in the region. Here is a full simulation. As it shows, after the initial contact, the Andromeda galaxy will make a kind of U-turn, and head back for the full-scale collision.
Galactic collisions are not a phenomenon that never occur. Several have been documented. They are essential to the continual evolution of galaxies, and have been occurring since the birth of the universe. As Curtis Struck said, “Collisions are not the result of rare, chance encounters. Rather they are the inevitable result of the continuing, (hierarchical) growth of large-scale structure in the universe. That is, collisions are written into the initial conditions.”
What will happen to our solar system? Nothing. We’re far away enough from the center of the galaxy (where the volume of stars per measured area greatly increases) to bypass destruction. The space between each star is so significant, that most stars from both galaxies will slide past each other, untouched. To put this into perspective, imagine the Sun shrunk down to the size of a grain of sand on a beach. Now imagine that there are two miles between two grains. That’s how far you would have to walk from the grain of sand representing the Sun to the next closest grain of sand, representing the closest star, Alpha Centauri. That is a lot of space. Even binary stars have a sizable distance between them. So basically, star-on-star collision is not as common.
Actual collisions of matter will occur, but between clouds of gas and dust from both galaxies. These collisions will send compression waves, compressing the material within the dust and the gas closer together. When the gravity force pressing them together is great enough, stars will form. Some individually, others in clusters ranging from thousands to millions of stars.
The collision, like everything else in space, will not be quick by our definition. It will take hundreds of millions of years to complete. By the end, the stars will settle into new positions, and there will be no trace left of the collision, aside from a new galaxy.
So although our planet is safe during the collision, approximately two billion years after the collision commences, the Sun will expand into a red giant, most likely engulfing the Earth in its path.
Something to which to look forward. :-)
There’s more here.
Simulation of a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, wherein the denser fluid on top is being accelerated into the less dense fluid beneath it.
Source: Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering(University of Minnesota), Link
A simulated Black Hole of ten solar masses as seen from a distance of 600km with the Milky Way in the background (horizontal camera opening angle: 90°).
More info: Step by Step into a Black Hole
While we aren’t able to watch an actual merger sequence taking place in nature, it is possible to simulate what a merger might look like. John Dubinski of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) has produced a number of simulations of galaxy mergers. Some examples are shown…
