Before anyone says anything, I'll question the metaphor myself: giant computer? That's just a stupid metaphor, as though we can compare a giant and the Universe. But then, we can't speak from a out-of-this-universe perspective, so, I suppose giant computer would have to do.
So now, if the Universe is a computer, what is it computing? How is it doing it? Are atoms and other structures it's transistors? What are we? (my theory: we are it's buffer overflow) If it is not a computer, what the heck is it?
A long running intellectual debate, the hardest problem so far, and all the blah. Discussion by brilliant scientists at Quirks and Quarks.
Categories
- Log in to post comments
More like this
First, a quick status note: the blog has been really slow lately because I
fell behind schedule on my book, and I've been putting all of my free time
into catching up. I'm finally pretty much caught up, so I should have time to
get back to the Chaos theory posts. I need a few days of study time to…
"Orbiting Earth in spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase beauty, not destroy it!" -Yuri Gagarin
Fifty-two years ago today, the first human being left Earth, and we began our journey into outer space. But back in 1961, we didn't really know how far outer…
"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." -H. L. Mencken
If you went back 100 years in time, you could rightfully claim that, scientifically, we had no convincing evidence as to where our Universe came from. After…
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.
There's no shortage of stupidity in the world. And, alas, it comes in
many, many different kinds. Among the ones that bug me, pretty much
the worst is the stupidity that comes from believing that you know
something that you don't.
This is…
Hi, I listened to it yesterday and parts of it went over my head, but there were interesting things and a few good laughs, like the unsurprising "Does it run Windows ?" and my favourite : "Can it crash ?"
Indeed, good laugh. The final few minutes on 0,1 and information was excellent. Along the same lines, I'd recommend In Our Times with Melvyn Bragg (some of the old episodes on science are great).
I just finished listening to it on the podcast. It was interesting in many ways, although the realization that quantum entanglement "teleportation" would be useless for creating FTL modems kinda dampened my day.
The only problem I had with the discussion was that there didn't seem to be a set definition of "information" they were using, which made it seem that folks were talking past each other on occasion.
I saw a show on the Science channel the other day full of the Ph.D. guys in the know about the universe. They said that only 5% of it is the atoms and such. 20% is dark matter and 75% of it is dark energy. So if it is a giant computer I don't think we are even to the point of being able to ask the right questions seeing as how we only know about 5% of it. Oh well, we won't run out of things to wonder about and discover! LOL!
Dave Briggs :~)