)As you may or may not have noticed (and if you haven’t, just play along; it’ll make me feel better), I’ve been posting a science link of the week every Wednesday over on the ESN Facebook wall.  Facebook seems like a good place for some empirical experimentation; it provides a Wall against which to throw things to see if they stick.  By its nature, it’s a bit ephemeral.  That’s great if something doesn’t work; before too long it drifts down the screen out of sight, and thus out of mind.  But if something was worthwhile, it doesn’t stick around very long either.
So, how about we take the best of those links every month or so and expand them into a blog post.  Right now I imagine it as sort of a “director’s cut” version of the Facebook material. I’ll start with the links and comments I posted, and then expand on the discussion that followed.  I don’t feel comfortable just cutting and pasting the comments of others wholesale, but I think it’s reasonable to summarize and anonymize that content in the interest of bring the discussion to a wider audience and keeping it moving forward.  And since I’ve been trying to frame my links with some questions, I see the blog as a place to offer my (decidedly undefinitive) answers those questions.
Sound good? Â Here we go!
October 17
Variations on “What if *we’re* living in ‘The Matrix’?” have been around a long time. I’m not sure this particular exploration would be definitive either way, but I do admire their effort to make the simulation hypothesis more concrete and testable. As I understand it, the logic appears to be that a simulated universe will be finite in certain particular ways (due to the limits of whatever platform is running the sim), whereas a real universe would be infinite/unbounded. Do you think that’s a reasonable distinction? What other criteria (measurable or otherwise) might characterize a simulation?
Well, this certainly got some conversation going. Â The response was basically “no,” it’s not a reasonable hypothesis because we can’t assume the hardware limitations of current computers would apply to a system capable of simulating the entire universe and which exists in some other universe. Â That’s a fair point. Â One could respond that the Bekenstein bound, rather than the specifics of current computer implementations, ultimately argues for a simulation which is discrete and bounded in some way, rather than infinite. Â But one could just as easily argue that the Bekenstein bound does not rule out systems of infinite size or energy which would then be capable of storing infinite information.
