Picked up a book today that I started reading a while back but then forgot about called “The Holographic Universe” by Michael Talbot. The book so far is an interesting read on the theory of the Universe being a projection of a 2D surface into 3D, so reality would basically be two dimensional. Personally,I don’t see why not when a 3D game is a projection of a one dimensional software program onto a virtual 3D world that we simple humans can do quite easily.
Anyway, I decided to a do a little digging into the holographic Universe theory and it looks very interesting and does put some very good arguments forward to explain various un-explainable physical and none physical phenomena. You can read more about the theory here
What’s more interesting to me (with me being a programmer) is the talk that Philip Rosedale gave (the creator of second life). He compares quantum tunnelling to the information processing limits of the system and quantum entanglement to optimisations.
According to quantum physics, all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties. It goes further to say that the natural unobserved state of a particle is wave-like and not what you would class as a solid particle. Once observed by a consciousness the particles wave-like nature collapses and we see a solid particle. This type of behaviour could represent an optimisation by the Universe, maybe wave like particles use less universal processing power? In game and software development in general you tend not to process everything all of the time as it is a waste of processing power and resources. Instead the programmer tends to reduce or stop processing objects that are not immediately visible or in some way interacting with the user (our conscious observer). For example, when you are playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare or some other shooter, the computer is only processing objects that are visible to / interacting with the player or about to be visible / interacting with the player. The rest lay either in a dormant state inside the computers memory (wave-form like when compared to particles), or have been completely removed from the game.
Also according to quantum physics, if you entangle two particles and move them apart vast distances (lets say the other side of the Universe) then change the state of the first particle, the state of the 2nd entangled particle will change to the opposite state. How is that possible over such vast distances? Don’t forget nothing can travel faster than the speed of light according to Einstein, so how does the 1st particle send the signal to the 2nd particle to change state? It’s just not physically possible. In software development we use variables to represent the states of objects. We can entangle two objects by giving each object a pointer to the other, so Object 1 points to Object 2 and Object 2 points back at Object 1 (they essentially remember each other). We could create a game that simulates a world the size of the universe using super massive numbers, we could then place these objects at opposite ends of our super massive game universe. Now I change the state of Object 1 and because I kept a pointer to Object 2 i can also tell it to change its state. No matter how far apart my two objects are, I can still change the state of either object just by having one of the objects at hand.
Yes, I know I’m no quantum physicist and this is all pure speculation, but nonetheless its very interesting speculation.
Are we all just living inside a vastly complex, almost infinite speed, super resolution 2D software program where our three dimensional reality is just a projection?
I hope so 🙂