20% chance we're living in a simulation - Oxford prof

[Ben D]

Imho, they should concentrate on the basics for now, say....lets start with the electron, what is it in reality made of?

[freemason9]

Imho, they should concentrate on the basics for now, say....lets start with the electron, what is it in reality made of?

Let's start with what "in reality" means, though.

[Hammer of Los]

...

Each man is a world entire.
Each man architect in his sphere.

Many spheres are there.

What happens when worlds collide?

Anything can happen in the next half hour!

I recall blue Aqua Marina.

The Tempest rages.

I got my 'phones.

Poles telegraph.

Not yet shall I lay down my books.

Salmon pen doth be frisky.

...

[Ben D]

Imho, they should concentrate on the basics for now, say....lets start with the electron, what is it in reality made of?

Let's start with what "in reality" means, though.

Real as in not just a mental conceptualization, be it in words or mathematics, but an unveiling of the whatever it is that the concept 'electron' stands for.

[justdrew]

electrons don't stand for anything anymore, all they do is spin.

anyway, its just a few quarks init?

[Ben D]

electrons don't stand for anything anymore, all they do is spin.

anyway, its just a few quarks init?

Firstly, the question wasn't what an electron stood for, but what is the reality represented by the concept 'electron'?

And if you are saying an electron is constituted of a few quarks, it then raises the question of what is a quark in reality,..what is it constituted of for example?

[justdrew]

electrons don't stand for anything anymore, all they do is spin.

anyway, its just a few quarks init?

Firstly, the question wasn't what an electron stood for, but what is the reality represented by the concept 'electron'?

And if you are saying an electron is constituted of a few quarks, it then raises the question of what is a quark in reality,..what is it constituted of for example?

well, you can make them out of photons, if the photons have enough energy. so I guess the same thing "light" is made of. it may even be they're all little complex standing waves in the space manifold. so what's that? It's axiomatic. might as well ask what a number is made out of I've never seen a rigorous Proof of 1.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_creation

[Ben D]

electrons don't stand for anything anymore, all they do is spin.

anyway, its just a few quarks init?

Firstly, the question wasn't what an electron stood for, but what is the reality represented by the concept 'electron'?

And if you are saying an electron is constituted of a few quarks, it then raises the question of what is a quark in reality,..what is it constituted of for example?

well, you can make them out of photons, if the photons have enough energy. so I guess the same thing "light" is made of. it may even be they're all little complex standing waves in the space manifold. so what's that? It's axiomatic. might as well ask what a number is made out of I've never seen a rigorous Proof of 1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_creation

No, my understanding of the reality represented by the concept of 'one' is clear, not so the true reality represented by the concept 'electron'. That it is composed of energy, spherical, spins, has an electric charge, has a magnetic moment, etc., describes it like the blind men and the elephant, but what is missing is the wholeness, the oneness of it in and of its environment.

Imho, the concept of a complex spherical standing wave of energy constituted of vibrational energy at a whole range of wavelengths approaching and perhaps going beyond Planck Length present in the zero point energy of the quantum vacuum, fits more with my present intuitive sense, for the medium in which the electron exists can't be ignored as though it is like a stand alone billiard ball. This here attempt to show the wave nature of an electron can't capture the probably real spherical nature of the electron, but it does show how the zero point energy of the quantum vacuum is what also constitutes the electron. Iow, there is an underlying oneness to this whole universe and it will be discovered when the so called vacuum of space is fully understood. Concepts like Aether, ZPE, Higgs Field, Dark energy, CMBR all point to an omnipresent underlying oneness, in which all matter is suspended, and I suggest that the different perspectives are a result of the Blind Men and the Elephant problem.

So, until science understands fully the humble electron particle (so called), what chances are there of realizing a good computer model of the universe? Oh wait,...that's how it science get's done, the blind men and the elephant approach, only some lucky ones get the job see how all the different perspectives fit together, the integration of the all the known attributes. What sort of security clearance does one need to get in that position?

[Hammer of Los]

...

Ya see, that's too science-y for me.

Epigrammatic is my idiom.

Or should that be idiot?

Night Owl's orbs peer in the dark,
To sight the strangeness, charm and quark.

I got tons of poems awaiting publishing.

...

[8bitagent]

I don't need a professor to tell me we're living in some sort of false construct illusion! Cell phones get big, cellphones get small but we're still living in 2000.

[JackRiddler]

Gotta hit this one more time, irresistible:

Scientists plan test to see if the entire universe is a simulation created by futuristic supercomputers

US scientists are attempting to find out whether all of humanity is currently living a Matrix-style computer simulation being run on supercomputers of the future. [...]

merely a simulation created by a futuristic android on its lunch break. [...]

created many years in the future.

"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted." - Krysta Now!

[DrEvil]

There are no quarks in electrons. They're both elementary particles, as far as we know.
As for what an electron actually represents, I have no idea. And neither does anyone else.

If we live in a simulation it would be interesting to know the specs on the something running it. Is there a cap on processing power? And are there other simulations running in parallel? If so, would it be possible to hack into a neighboring universe, like breaking into a virtual machine running in the cloud from another virtual machine running in the same cloud (which is possible)?

[JackRiddler]

My hypothesis on the universe:

99% chance we're observing within a highly limited horizon.

.

[Hammer of Los]

...

The only reason I know we are in a simulation is because I have already been hacking it for a while.

It's fun.

...

[8bitagent]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50232422/ns ... NB1D_Lg9Ms

Is 'reality' unreal? Scientists work on a way to find out
Physicists propose cosmic-ray experiment to test idea that we're living in a simulation

What if everything — all of us, the world, the universe — was not real? What if everything we are, know and do was really just someone's computer simulation?

The notion that our reality was some kid on a couch in the far future playing with a computer game like a gigantic Sim City, or Civilization, and we are the player's characters, isn't new. But some physicists now think they know of a way to test the concept. Three of them propose to test reality by simulating the simulators.

Martin Savage, professor of physics at the University of Washington, Zohreh Davoudi, one of his graduate students, and Silas Beane of the University of New Hampshire would like to see whether they can find traces of simulation in cosmic rays. The work was uploaded in arXiv, an online archive for drafts of academic research papers.

The notion that reality is something other than we think it is goes far back in philosophy, including Plato and his Parable of the Cave, which claimed reality was merely shadows of real objects on a cave wall. Sixteenth-century philosopher-mathematician René Descartes thought he proved reality with his famous "I think, therefore I am," which proposed that he was real and his thoughts had a reality.

Then, in 2003, a British philosopher, Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford, published a paper that had the philosophy and computer science departments buzzing.

The Matrix hypothesis
Bostrom suggested three possibilities: "The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small," "almost no technologically mature civilizations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours,” or we are "almost certainly" a simulation.

All three could be equally possible, he wrote, but if the first two are false, the third must be true. "There will be an astronomically huge number of simulated minds like ours," Bostrom wrote.

His suggestion was that our descendants, far in the future, would have the computer capacity to run simulations that complex, and that there might be millions of simulations, and millions of virtual universes with billions of simulated brains in them.

Bostrom's paper came out four years after the popular film, "The Matrix," in which humans discover they were simulations run by malevolent machines. The popularity of the film possibly contributed to the attention to Bostrom’s paper received at the time, but nothing came of it.

"He put it together in clear terms and came out with probabilities of what is likely and what is not," Savage said. "He crystallized it, at least in my mind."

Looking for anomalies
In the movie and in Savage's proposal, the discovery that reality was virtual came when unexpected errors showed up in life, demonstrating imperfections in the simulation.