Superconductors are not just temperature-limited, but also current-limited.

This is really an artificial problem. There's no point in tackling it, when fuel cells circumvent it neatly.

Claiming self-organized criticality explains the mind, as TFA does, is akin to claiming that a model of how clock synchronization works in a microprocessor explains the algorithms it implements. This is literally the dumbest thing I've seen posted on Slashdot in a long while. If you really want to know how the mind works, read the work of leading neuroscientists like Damasio (Self Comes to Mind is a good start, then just follow up on the extensive bilbiography therein).

I commend your good intentions, but in the end, please realize that it's futile to argue with the sufferers of Assburgers syndrome.

You think that's bad? Look at the genius who wants to charge car batteries at that rate: http://hardware.slashdot.org/c...

What's sad is not that post by itself, but the moderation it got, which really showcases the sorry state of technical education prevalent so much that even the average moderator at a supposedly technically-savvy place like Slashdot would confuse fantasy with an good idea within the realm of possibility.

My favorite post of the week. Please mod parent up.

00 gauge isn't anywhere close to cutting it, even if you're running this at a few kV. GP poster simply didn't think this through when rushing to post.

Please mod parent down: charging the car in 1-2 minutes would require recharging at one to two megawatts, which, even at high voltage, would require two orders of magnitude more current than reasonable wiring can handle (reasonable: something a human could lift).

Your cow/goat swapping comment implies you've bought into the common myth that money developed as a replacement for barter. http://thememorybank.co.uk/pap... http://cas.umkc.edu/econ/econo...

Exactly: they can be encoded finitely by their corresponding generative algorithms. I think mathematicians' tendency to extend their thinking to infinities are really flights of fancy that have little to do with the real universe; those are more about psychology than physics.

My point was that pi and e are not properties of the physical universe. In a sense, it's the algorithms that compute them to a given precision that are properties (because they can be encoded finitely, and thus physically), and the precision limits depends on the extent and energy density of the finite region of the universe under consideration.

I was specifically addressing this: If math was really modeling the universe well, we would have whole numbers for constants: e, c, k, pi.

Your comment implies we don't have whole numbers for constants for a good reason, beyond just a choice of a number system. Indeed, you acknowledged this in your response to brantondaveperson below, saying you can't have both pi and e as whole numbers in a single numeric system. What this really implies is that pi and e are each nice and compact characteristics of the physical universe that, if the math was actually representative of said physical universe, ought to be representable in that math as something akin to whole numbers. Of course, they are neither. They are, however, representable in the natural number math quite well: they map directly to the finite algorithms that can compute them to a given precision, whereby the precision limit of the computation (dependent on time and storage) has a dual in the physical universe--the constraints imposed by a finite spacial extent and finite energy density mentioned in my post above. Pi and e to arbitrary precision are not properties of any finite portion of the physical universe; only the finitely-encodable algorithms that compute them are.

The question is whether physics exhibits some signature of an incomplete simulation by a concrete machine with characteristics familiar to us.

Yes, and it depends on exactly what is meant by "characteristics familiar to us". If the simulation hypothesis is correct, the host 'machine' in question is more likely to share characteristics with our universe's physics that have to do with the nature of computability in a qualitative sense, rather than merely quantitative (and specifically, scalability and efficiency). I don't find it implausible that the similarity doesn't much extend to the latter (but does to the former); if that is the case, it still may be the case that the simulation is imperfect as proposed in the paper.

It's just a difference of degree. There are hard physical limits on information processing that cannot be exceeded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
NB that these limits directly imply that any finite region of space can be fully simulated by a sufficiently large, (non-deterministic) linear bounded automaton--an abstract computational machine less powerful than a Turing machine.

QM by itself is not enough. It's only once you mix it with thermodynamics that you can derive the Bekenstein bound (the result that the maximum information in a region of space is the entropy of a black hole of the same surface area) and thus put an ultimate limit on information density. There are also hard physical limits on minimum energy per unit of computation, and minimum time per unit of computation (Margolus–Levitin theorem, Bremermann's limit, etc.).

>>If math was really modeling the universe well, we would have whole numbers for constants: e, c, k, pi.

You're wrong in your implication. Quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are fully computable theories. Moreover, in the physical universe there are no arbitrary precision real numbers, because that would allow you to encode infinite information in a single quantity, which would violate the Bekenstein bound--a fundamental limit on the number of distinguishable quantum states in a finite region of space (which is equivalent to limiting the information that can be stored in a finite region): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...