Search This Blog

Saturday, July 3, 2010

The Universe is a computer simulation

Curmudgeonly & Skeptical has an astronomical photo of a "hole in space" and asks what is it? The answer is almost too obvious to require explanation, but I did anyway.

I'm sure all your readers are familiar with the idea that the universe is actually a computer simulation. Every simulation has its glitches. The hole in space is a minor one.

Some of the other obvious glitches: half the events in Spanish history happened in 1492; the Japanese and Scandinavians morphed from Samurais and Vikings into inoffensive Saab jockeys and Hello Kitty consumers; a movie about a mathematician won an Oscar; a Kenyan became President of the US; the Red Sox won a World Series; John Travolta and Mickey Rourke won't stay dead; vuvuzelas; you don't even know who Renee Olstead is; the state of Massachusetts; and the Turing word for this post is "lasouna", which is ludicrous.
Not only is our "universe" a simulation, but it's running under limited resources. Take the way certain mathematical constants get reused in completely different contexts. There's an old joke about an actuary giving a presentation to the executives of an insurance company. He puts up a slide with the formula for the number of life insurance customers who will die in the next year. One of the executives interrupts. "What's that in the formula? That funny symbol?"

The actuary looks and says, "That's pi. You know, the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter."

The executive explodes. "What malarkey is this! What does a circle have to do with how many people are going to die!?"

But given that it takes an infinite number of bytes to store pi, you can see where using the same constant for both, really saves on the memory.

1 comment: