Comment Re:journey paused (Score 1) 58
That will depend a lot on whether the Klingons and Trisolarons join forces.
That will depend a lot on whether the Klingons and Trisolarons join forces.
This is also vanilla RAM. Well, rad-hardened to the best of their ability back then, but as far as I can tell, there's oy error-correction in transmissions, not in the RAM itself.
https://destevez.net/2021/12/v...
Error-correcting RAM is used in business on Earth because cosmic rays can corrupt data over the brief lifespans of a business server. Imagine being in deep space with no atmosphere, no magnetosphere, and no heliosphere. The radiation the Voyagers are having to endure is orders of magnitude greater than designed for and for decades longer.
That a chip has fried is news because it's just one. NASA does amazingly well, but I doubt New Horizons will last as long, and I sincerely doubt any private firm will be capable of building a probe that can Voyager's achievements.
Strangely, that's not actually true. Our brains did indeed evolve to work with maths, and indeed many animals (including insects) work with maths in identical ways. When independent cultures discovered maths, they discovered the same maths. They used different number bases and different symbols, but the formulations are identical.
Archimedes' formulations for statistics are virtually identical to Pascal's, and Archimedes' formulations for calculus work the same way as Leibnuz' and Newton's. Three independent forms of calculus that are basically identical, and two independent formulations of statistics that are also basically identical.
If everything from bees to crows to humans have identical maths, and all humans of all cultures have identical maths, then it gets seriously problematic to call it an invention.
If you cannot build a universe in which Pi or e take different values, then those values are not artifacts.
The only thing humans have done is chosen which axioms apply to a given system. Everything else is a consequence of the axioms chosen. Neither the steps to derive consequences nor the consequences themselves are manufactured.
Maths is natural. It is completely independent of who stumbles on the relationships and would be exact the same in every universe should other universes exist.
You simply can't construct a universe in which Pi is 4 which you could if maths were an invention.
If we show that gravity follows GR and cannot be quantised, then spacetime would have to he continuous.
I agree that systemd makes a pig's war of everything.
So it's all down to those meddling kids and their dog.
Space, time, matter, and possibly energy as well are thought to be emergent phenomena ultimately resulting from field interactions (with space and time emerging from particle interactions and particles resulting from field interactions).
If Prof Tegmark is correct, fields themselves emerge from maths. If string theorists are correct, fields emerge from brane interactions.
No matter who us right (if anyone), concepts like "physical" take a beating. If space and time are the result of interactions between interactions between fields, then all if our equations are upside-down. Nothing occurs in space over time, space and time occur in interactions, which then presumably must vary over some other quality.
We've also got a problem with objective reality. Quantum calculations work between measurements, but definitely don't work if you try to calculate intermediate states. You almost have to assume there aren't any, that reality only exists when it's observed.
If concepts like "reality" and "physical" don't refer to anything that is useful, if assuming them produces calculations that are always wrong, then they might not be useful concepts. Quantum Mechanics seems to describe what the universe does, but not why it does it or how it does it. The numbers "just work". That's indeed the basis behind the standard interpretation.
But if that is the case, and if seems to be, then it seems reasonable for theoreticians to try and produce models that say why that's the case. However, I've no issue with it being left to theoreticians, which Elon Musk et al certainly aren't.
"Woke" simply means you're not ignoring reality. And nothing more. If you're a geek who is ignoring reality, then I want your geek card.
If Professor Penrose is correct about the nature of consciousness, then Many Worlds cannot be correct.
If quantum uncertainty in position applies to spacetime and not just space, then Many Worlds would require that particles can experience interactions that don't actually occur in the timeline of the observer.
Many Worlds is mandatory if (a) information must be conserved, (b) superposition is information and not just potential information, and (c) the universe along any given path is an open system. But if it is an open system, with the sum of all paths being a closed system, we must consider the other conservation laws from that standpoint.
So there might be possible openings.
It would indeed be falsifiable. Remember, QM predicts that the universe is filled with quantum foam on the order of Planck scale, and also predicts that interactions can operate over any distance (although information itself cannot move faster than light).
This is, essentially, not computable on any architecture whatsoever. You'd have to have simplifications. And that means GR and QM cannot be unified if we live in a simulation. GR would be a deliberate simplification to avoid having to do an impossible number of calculations. It would be roughly right, but measurably different.
You also have to have quantised spacetime, as no technology (however advanced) can describe infinite precision.
Simulation can be event-based or time-based. Since there seem to be valid reasons for thinking objective reality is a very dodgy concept between quantum observations - we can calculate outcomes but not paths to get there, the numbers don't work if you try to do intermediate calculations - then I would contend physics as we understand it could only be done via an event-driven model. But if this is true, then it would be necessary that this be true for ALL of physics at this level. The simulation would need to be consistent for everything modelled, but physics has no such constraint.
Time is thought to emerge from particle interactions, and particles are thought to emerge from field interactions. By implication, fields can't be constrained by any restriction on time. If fields are event-driven, then I might get interested.
If it's a simulation, laws will have to be approximate. You simply can't model every particle in the universe individually with a precision on the order of Planck units.
And that means, to quote a book doing the rounds at the moment, that physics does not exist and never will exist. Not at a fundamental level.
It also means that the gap between GR and QM might be hard-coded. The simplifications used might be such that a unified theory could never exist.
It wouldn't matter to the average person, sure, but it'd seriously throw a spanner in the works for scientists trying to exploit different properties.
There's a few constraints.
Simulation theory REQUIRES a quantised spacetime, as no computer can record numbers with infinite precision, regardless of how it is made or the type of technology used.
Simulation theory ALSO REQUIRES that solutions be approximate, since the computational complexity of systems rises exponentially. At the finest levels, then, practice should not agree with any consistent theory.
Finally, Simulation theory ALSO REQUIRES that Professor Penrose is wrong about the origins of consciousness as it requires effects to precede cause at the scale of Planck time. (As much as I'm suspicious of Penrose's conclusions, I'm not insane enough or drunk enough to bet against a multiple Nobel Prize winner.)
Having said that, the second of these might be correct. We can't find any quantum foam:
https://thequantuminsider.com/...
Quantum foam is absolutely essential, or physics doesn't work. But the effects it should cause just aren't there. I blame the trisolarons.
If the hallucination involves object oriented code, it'd be class hysteria.
If someone rewrote systemd using formal methods, the same way SEL4 is written, then there would be very few downsides to it. The problem is that the defect density is higher than one would like for a critical application that does control much of the system.
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek