Sarah's Unifying Theory of Physics
Aug. 6th, 2010 01:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clovehitchedDisclaimer: This post might not be entirely serious, read at your own risk.
On March 3rd, 1972, NASA launched its Pioneer 10 probe. This was followed by Pioneer 11. Pioneer 10 is the one with the famous plaque showing naked human bodies on it so that the space aliens will know all about us, which is kinda cute.
In the nearly 40 years since launch, these spacecraft have gone a bloody long way, and are heading towards the heliopause.
However, something about these two probes baffles astronomers. As you might expect, the Sun's gravity is slowing them down (it shouldn't ever reclaim them - they have solar escape velocity, so they will go interstellar eventually and end up who-knows-where, in some other star system long after our species is extinct. I think Pioneer 10 is used as target practice by a Klingon in one of the Star Trek films, but I digress). The thing is, they're not slowing down as much as they should. This is known as the Pioneer Anomaly.
Scientists have proposed all sorts of explanations about why this might be. Dark matter pulling at them from outside? Our understanding of gravity or inertia being wrong? Some completely new physics? Something else?
Well, I just worked out what it is tonight. I was playing this awesome computer game on the iPad - Osmos, which is sort of a cross between Thrust and Katamari - you have this mote and it can fire off reaction mass and absorb things smaller than itself, but gets absorbed by bigger things. You have tasks on each level (usually becoming big, or absorbing a specific target). One set of levels features "attractors". This is basically where there is a central object on the level which exerts gravity, and everything orbits round it. You have to have some knowledge of how orbits work to do these levels - going away from the "star" by speeding up, changing your eccentricity, that sort of thing.
One of them has a goal of absorbing the attractor itself, and when you do something odd happens - everything else in the system stops orbiting and leaves the system on a tangential path, because once you absorb the attractor, gravity disappears.
In other words, the motes have inertial mass, but not gravitational mass. The only thing with gravitation mass is the attractor.
There is a reason for this - doing a gravitational simulation of an N-body system, where N is large (and these levels start off with hundreds or even thousands of motes) gets computationally hard really fast. There's no way the iPad with its impressive but still quite small processor (I worked for the company which designed it in a former life) could handle the maths quickly enough, so it cheats. Mostly you don't notice. except when the attractor disappears and gravity suddenly fails, because the cheat is close enough.
Various people have proposed that our universe is some kind of computer simulation. It seems likely by the sheer weight of numbers. The argument goes that we're getting quite good at computer technology, and can envisage a day when computers are really really good, and we could build one so huge, and so massively parallel, and so vastly powerful that it would be able to perform a physics simulation of an entire universe.
Take this one step further, and it would follow that intelligent life would eventually arise inside the simulation, if it has similar rules to our universe, and start building its own virtual computers. The organisms being simulated would not know they were simulations, of course - how could they? Eventually they would build a virtual computer powerful enough to simulate a universe of their own, and so it would repeat, all the way down, like Russian doll universes, with only the outermost actually being real.
Of course, if the simulations were done well enough then each universe's inhabitants would think they were living in the real one, but only one universe out of thousands, or even millions, would be right.
The odds are, therefore, that our universe is a simulation.
But this is ultimately solipsistic, or at least along similar lines. We can't know whether it's true, and even if it is we can't tell, so it's a philosophically pointless position.
Or is it?
See, I reckon the temptation might be to simulate a universe before your computer was powerful enough to do it properly. Consider if you were alive 10,000 years from now with scary powerful computer technology, and capitalism still exists and you want to make the ultimate computer game - a full immersion computer game which simulates a whole universe for players to get lost in. It would of course be populated with AIs (us), to make the game more interesting. Maybe you could rule over them as their god and torment them in interesting ways, and see if they still worship you or something equally sadistic (there's this iPhone game like that - it's quite good fun!)
You'd want to get this to market before your competitors could, to maximise your profits and fame, so you're tempted to cut corners a bit. In particular, you can make things go much faster if you don't do gravity properly. You just need to make it convincing enough that it looks real to your player, and your AIs. In other words, you cheat like mad to lower the minimum system requirements and hope nobody uncovers the corner cases.
That's why the Pioneers are speeding up. Our universe is a computer game, and the program isn't doing gravity properly.
It's a brilliant theory - it even explains George W Bush!
Where do I get my Nobel Prize?
Also posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/244763.html - you can comment here or there.
On March 3rd, 1972, NASA launched its Pioneer 10 probe. This was followed by Pioneer 11. Pioneer 10 is the one with the famous plaque showing naked human bodies on it so that the space aliens will know all about us, which is kinda cute.
In the nearly 40 years since launch, these spacecraft have gone a bloody long way, and are heading towards the heliopause.
However, something about these two probes baffles astronomers. As you might expect, the Sun's gravity is slowing them down (it shouldn't ever reclaim them - they have solar escape velocity, so they will go interstellar eventually and end up who-knows-where, in some other star system long after our species is extinct. I think Pioneer 10 is used as target practice by a Klingon in one of the Star Trek films, but I digress). The thing is, they're not slowing down as much as they should. This is known as the Pioneer Anomaly.
Scientists have proposed all sorts of explanations about why this might be. Dark matter pulling at them from outside? Our understanding of gravity or inertia being wrong? Some completely new physics? Something else?
Well, I just worked out what it is tonight. I was playing this awesome computer game on the iPad - Osmos, which is sort of a cross between Thrust and Katamari - you have this mote and it can fire off reaction mass and absorb things smaller than itself, but gets absorbed by bigger things. You have tasks on each level (usually becoming big, or absorbing a specific target). One set of levels features "attractors". This is basically where there is a central object on the level which exerts gravity, and everything orbits round it. You have to have some knowledge of how orbits work to do these levels - going away from the "star" by speeding up, changing your eccentricity, that sort of thing.
One of them has a goal of absorbing the attractor itself, and when you do something odd happens - everything else in the system stops orbiting and leaves the system on a tangential path, because once you absorb the attractor, gravity disappears.
In other words, the motes have inertial mass, but not gravitational mass. The only thing with gravitation mass is the attractor.
There is a reason for this - doing a gravitational simulation of an N-body system, where N is large (and these levels start off with hundreds or even thousands of motes) gets computationally hard really fast. There's no way the iPad with its impressive but still quite small processor (I worked for the company which designed it in a former life) could handle the maths quickly enough, so it cheats. Mostly you don't notice. except when the attractor disappears and gravity suddenly fails, because the cheat is close enough.
Various people have proposed that our universe is some kind of computer simulation. It seems likely by the sheer weight of numbers. The argument goes that we're getting quite good at computer technology, and can envisage a day when computers are really really good, and we could build one so huge, and so massively parallel, and so vastly powerful that it would be able to perform a physics simulation of an entire universe.
Take this one step further, and it would follow that intelligent life would eventually arise inside the simulation, if it has similar rules to our universe, and start building its own virtual computers. The organisms being simulated would not know they were simulations, of course - how could they? Eventually they would build a virtual computer powerful enough to simulate a universe of their own, and so it would repeat, all the way down, like Russian doll universes, with only the outermost actually being real.
Of course, if the simulations were done well enough then each universe's inhabitants would think they were living in the real one, but only one universe out of thousands, or even millions, would be right.
The odds are, therefore, that our universe is a simulation.
But this is ultimately solipsistic, or at least along similar lines. We can't know whether it's true, and even if it is we can't tell, so it's a philosophically pointless position.
Or is it?
See, I reckon the temptation might be to simulate a universe before your computer was powerful enough to do it properly. Consider if you were alive 10,000 years from now with scary powerful computer technology, and capitalism still exists and you want to make the ultimate computer game - a full immersion computer game which simulates a whole universe for players to get lost in. It would of course be populated with AIs (us), to make the game more interesting. Maybe you could rule over them as their god and torment them in interesting ways, and see if they still worship you or something equally sadistic (there's this iPhone game like that - it's quite good fun!)
You'd want to get this to market before your competitors could, to maximise your profits and fame, so you're tempted to cut corners a bit. In particular, you can make things go much faster if you don't do gravity properly. You just need to make it convincing enough that it looks real to your player, and your AIs. In other words, you cheat like mad to lower the minimum system requirements and hope nobody uncovers the corner cases.
That's why the Pioneers are speeding up. Our universe is a computer game, and the program isn't doing gravity properly.
It's a brilliant theory - it even explains George W Bush!
Where do I get my Nobel Prize?
Also posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/244763.html - you can comment here or there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 02:18 am (UTC)Sarah, you are a genius!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 11:07 am (UTC)But nice hypothesis!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 11:30 am (UTC)Not incompatible with the theory though ;-)
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 04:21 am (UTC)If this is a computer programme, where are the power-ups? I want super powers.
Date: 2010-08-06 07:20 am (UTC)http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-108808
Re: If this is a computer programme, where are the power-ups? I want super powers.
Date: 2010-08-06 11:27 am (UTC)Re: If this is a computer programme, where are the power-ups? I want super powers.
Date: 2010-08-06 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 07:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 11:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 08:56 am (UTC)But that all kinda assumes that simulating universes can be done at all...
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 11:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 01:41 pm (UTC)I think. I'm not an expert!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 12:13 pm (UTC)If the super iPad - or whatever running our universe - has become self aware..... we're living inside someone's pet Cylon!
Can I have Baltar's IP address? I want to contact him and join his hareem!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 06:42 pm (UTC)Congratulations NAME HERE!!1!
You have won a Nobel Prize for your theory!
Send only £99.99 now and receive your Nobel Prize certificate and souvenir commemorative plate! For a limited time only!
no subject
Date: 2010-08-06 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-08 11:45 pm (UTC)*makes equivocatory gesture*
...better porn though.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-08 11:49 pm (UTC)...so remember kids, don't expand exponentially into the universe. You might trigger a serious server overload.
Which raises the question: would an intelligent AI in a simulation notice if the system was suffering from lag? I doubt it. This could be a way to spot the alien players!