Digital physics is a speculative idea that the universe can be conceived of as a vast, digital computation device, or as the output of a deterministic or probabilistic

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program ...

. The hypothesis that the

universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the universe. ...

is a

digital computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These program ...

was proposed by

Konrad Zuse Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program ...

in his 1969 book '' Rechnender Raum'' ("''Calculating Space''"). The term ''digital physics'' was coined by

Edward Fredkin Edward Fredkin (born October 2, 1934) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions include work on reversible computing and cellular automata. ...

in 1978, who later came to prefer the term digital philosophy. Fredkin encouraged the creation of a digital physics group at what was then

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

Laboratory for Computer Science Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

, with

Tommaso Toffoli Tommaso Toffoli () is an Italian-American professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University where he joined the faculty in 1995. He has worked on cellular automata and the theory of artificial life (with Edward Fredkin and oth ...

and

Norman Margolus Norman H. Margolus (born 1955) is a Canadian-American physicist and computer scientist, known for his work on cellular automata and reversible computing.. He is a research affiliate with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laborator ...

as primary figures. ''Digital physics'' suggests that there exists, at least in principle, a

program Program, programme, programmer, or programming may refer to: Business and management * Program management, the process of managing several related projects * Time management * Program, a part of planning Arts and entertainment Audio * Progra ...

for a

universal computer A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algori ...

that computes the evolution of the

. The computer could be, for example, a huge

cellular automaton A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tesse ...

. Extant models of digital physics are incompatible with the existence of several continuous characters of physical

symmetries Symmetry (from grc, συμμετρία "agreement in dimensions, due proportion, arrangement") in everyday language refers to a sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance. In mathematics, "symmetry" has a more precise definiti ...

, e.g.,

rotational symmetry Rotational symmetry, also known as radial symmetry in geometry, is the property a shape has when it looks the same after some rotation by a partial turn. An object's degree of rotational symmetry is the number of distinct orientations in which i ...

translational symmetry In geometry, to translate a geometric figure is to move it from one place to another without rotating it. A translation "slides" a thing by . In physics and mathematics, continuous translational symmetry is the invariance of a system of equati ...

Lorentz symmetry In relativistic physics, Lorentz symmetry or Lorentz invariance, named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, is an equivalence of observation or observational symmetry due to special relativity implying that the laws of physics stay the same ...

, and the Lie group gauge invariance of Yang–Mills theories, all central to current physical theory. Moreover, extant models of digital physics violate various well-established features of quantum physics, belonging to the class of theories with local

hidden variables Hidden variables may refer to: * Confounding, in statistics, an extraneous variable in a statistical model that correlates (directly or inversely) with both the dependent variable and the independent variable * Hidden transformation, in computer ...

that have so far been ruled out experimentally using Bell's theorem.

See also

References

Further reading