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.

Aren't the Chinese hackers generally a bit more competent?

The fact that the patches were badly broken and utterly inept sounds more like the work of a rival OS developer.

Microsoft is a likely suspect.

"The Linux"? Why trust a rant by someone who can't write in English.

Linux is extremely secure, if set up correctly. And, if set up correctly, the xz exploit would have little or no impact. It would not make a properly secured machine vulnerable.

First, water vapour is opaque at visible frequencies, but the sun emits over a very wide band, most of which will totally ignore clouds. For something like this, you'd use radio astronomy. The sun is a superb radio source, easily strong enough to compete with terrestrial sources, especially if you pick the right frequency.

Second, no it wouldn't. It wouldn't be triggered by the presence of detecting light on the optical spectrum, but the presence of a specific alignment. So you only ever synchronise when you hit exactly the correct point.

You then want an interferometer to observe the sun, where the centre of your virtual dish is precisely the meridian. When the centre of the sun is precisely midway across your telescope's field of view, you transmit a synchronisation pulse.

Thirdly, a leap second is introduced every 21 months or so. If we assume a month of 30 days, that means you have clock drift of 1/630th of a second per day. You could miss a lot of days before the maximum possible error exceeded the minimum error in the clocks used. The risk of time travel would be zero.

The chief benefit of a quantum gas clock is that it is able to measure time accurately enough to measure even small relativistic effects. (The change in the speed of time from a vertical displacement of ten feet is observable.)

Redefining a second according to such clocks won't cause any serious headaches - most users won't notice the difference, and those who would likely already use quantum gas clocks.

But it would make a difference in what they publish, as the intervals of time would have genuine meaning. (It's hard to talk about attosecond intervals when the error bars of what a second actually means will swamp the interval you're measuring.)

The chief benefit for synchronising to a quantum gas clock is that the error you inevitably introduce into the system is much smaller than the error of the atomic clock.

I would call your criticisms fair. And, yes, 192k would be sensible for the reasons you mention.

Instead of faffing around, do this:

1. Install a quantum gas clock as the planetary timekeeper. It's much more accurate than an atomic clock. Place this at the Greenwich Observatory.

2. Agree on a fixed alignment as the start of a day.

3. Place a sensor at Greenwich which detects when that alignment occurs. This resets the counter for the quantum gas clock, so a second always starts when the alignment occurs.

4. Synchronise all atomic clocks to the quantum gas clock.

There is now a daily reset which is at a much higher resolution than most computer clocks (but within the nanosecond resolution Linux supports). The system itself adds and removes fractions of a second as needed with no need of political decisions. This correction will always be smaller than natural clock drift, so is inside the error bar software is already designed to handle.

I don't see why not. The Doctor does it all the time.

You might find this article interesting. It's a bit basic in places but looks generally good at first glance.

https://www.mojo-audio.com/blo...

Humans have been way too slow and the lead time between change and effect can be 20-40 years. We're locked in to worsening conditions until between 2045 and 2065.

But it'll take until 2060 before meaningful action starts, because humans only act after the disaster. It's a tendency baked in to how we operate and how we think.

So we need the engineers to act now, so that when we do finally act as a society, it's not too late.

This is an incident in the US and does not appear to be related to the incident between Australia and New Zealand when an aircraft lost all of its flight controls and plunged out of the sky.