In other words, "the universe is a simulation" is an unevidenced assertion, much like the multiverse.
It is far worse than that because unless we find the programmer(s) (or possibly a bug/exploit!) there will never be any evidence of the simulation. In this way believing in a simulation is just like a religion - there is literally no difference because the only way to scientifically prove a religion is to find evidence of god. Everything which religious fundamentalists explain as "god creating it that way" a simulation can explain by "the programmer(s) creating it that way" and QM is not a problem in that regard if you are simulating the universe itself because outside the simulation we have no idea what the physical laws are so we can literally just invoke magic.
The arguments made in the article about QM are not obstacles (and in some cases very poorly explained e.g. the spin of an electron is exactly known at all times because it is a fermion and has a spin-1/2, what is not known is the direction the spin vector points) because even if we restrict ourselves to the type of computers we know about they are easily solved by simply saying that the simulation is pre-determined. You can reproduce all QM phenomena, and indeed any phenomena you can imagine, this way. However since the simulation runs in a universe we know nothing about the limitations on such a computer are utterly unknown. Hence belief in a simulation is unfalsifiable and so not a scientific theory but a belief.
Not exactly. After all, you can't measure how "fast" or "slow" something "passes" except by doing so... over time. Which leads to a bit of a circular definition.
Not really. Time is always determined as the period between two events just as space is always measured as the distance between two physical objects. If you have a physical process that you know takes a fixed amount of time to happen then, when you look at it in the moving frame, it will take longer to happen so, relative to you, time has been slowed down...or more correctly now partly coincides with one of your space directions. However since you now only perceive part of their taime axis as being parallel to your own it does mean that time is slowed for them relative to you.
Slow it down is not the same as stop, and "will stop" is a prediction.
Yes a prediction based on existing physical laws...welcome to a physics discussion this is what they generally involve: extrapolation of existing physics to situations you can dream up.
Really saddens me that you use an if statement in a physics discussion.
Don't be sad! Again this is a very common statement in physics discussions because of their nature. One of the fundamental reasons physics is so useful is that it can make predictions such as "if in situation X then Y will happen" so if statements are infused throughout physics discussions and as already mentioned they are based on extrapolating existing, experimentally well established laws to a particular situation.
You are pontificating.
Try looking up what pontificating means. I was not stating opinions but facts and stating facts which counter your beliefs might annoy you but that still does not make them opinions.
If people are upset about all this, perhaps our elected representatives can change the laws?
The problem with this is that these companies have an army of lawyers trying to find holes in whatever laws are passed. They can find these holes faster than laws can be patched because governments have to tread carefully to make sure new laws do not accidentally penalize companies who are behaving themselves. The only way I can see governments defeating this is by giving themselves far more discretionary taxation power to target individual companies than they currently have and that can lead to abuse of that power if we are not careful.
Actually we can slow it down: time passes more slowly for an object moving at a high velocity relative to the observer. In the limit that this approaches the speed of light in a vacuum time will stop.
We cannot evaluate the opposite of time, or "not-time".
Yes we can. If the flow of time reversed we could do experiments which would unambiguously determine this. The oscillation of kaons and B-mesons show that physics is not the same if time is reversed. This is called T-violation and is closely associated with the difference between matter and anti-matter, something called CP-violation.
We cannot directly "measure" time. We cannot directly "see" time. If we cannot evaluate these things, does time exist?
Exactly the same applies to space: we "see" and "measure" space by looking at the physical separation between things in the same way that we "see" and "measure" time by detecting the time between events. Space is as real as time - it clearly exists because events happen at different times in the just the same way that they do not happen at the same place. In a universe with no matter or energy then there would be no way to detect the presence of space or time but then there would be nothing there to ponder their existence either.
For example, if you aren't looking at something in a video game it doesn't get rendered, ergo schrodingers cat like phenomena. The moon in fact is not there if you don't look at it.
This is NOT AT ALL how quantum mechanics works. Schrodinger's Cat was a gedanken experiment developed by Schrodinger to show how absurd the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was when applied to everyday objects. Absolutely no physicist believes that this is how QM actually works: the cat is simply either alive or it is dead and is not in a superposition of two states. The point was to show that the prevailing interpretation at the time was wrong. The same goes for the world: QM does not say that things stop existing if they are not observed and nobody believes this. QM is strange and counter-intuitive, it is not crazy!
Why? Isn't an innovation that makes it easier to distribute content in higher quality an innovation, even if you can't tell the difference?
Yes technically it is an innovation but unless it does something to improve the cinema experience why do I care? It is like the innovation of circular tea bags. Yes this is technically an innovation and yes it will temporarily boost sales but only until everyone figures out that it makes no difference whatsoever and goes back to what they were doing before. What a lot of people seem to forget is that it is not innovation we want it is useful innovation.
What about digital distribution of digital content displayed via huge digital display systems?
It basically looks just the same as that from a film. It might save the cinema money but it does nothing for the customer. There is pseudo-3D I suppose but that shrinks the screen and gives many people a splitting headache after a few minutes. So I suppose the criterion should be innovation that is good for the customer.
At some point, someone has to be the grownup in the room and say "you know, that would be really nice, but we simply can't afford it".
There is another alternative so solve that if what you are going to cut is really important: you can raise taxes. However I understand that Trump wants to lower taxes and apparently by cutting basic science. That's a very short term strategy. It may take a decade or two but if you fall behind the rest of the world in science you are handing us a huge economic advantage....errr...so forget I said anything, this sounds like a great plan!
The students sued because the lectures were not available in a suitable format to meet the requirements of the ADA.
This would explain why, when I upload my own lectures from Canada, YouTube always wants to know that they have never been aired in the US prior to release.
The exception in the statement "just about every other" is of course Switzerland
Really? When I lived in Switzerland everyone I knew thought the cost of health insurance was insanely expensive - certainly compared to just over the border in France. More recently when we have been paying the costs for postdocs and their families the costs have similarly been extremely expensive. It might be cheaper than the US but the US health costs are just insane - compare it to other European countries and I think you will find it looks very expensive.
Stop saying a national healthcare system is a free healthcare system. It isn't. Healthcare is not a right that governments can simply dole out
National health care IS a free system to those who need it. Obviously it is paid for by tax payers but their money goes purely to providing healthcare and not also to provide profit for shareholders. It absolutely IS a right that governments can simply dole out and the overwhelming majority of governments in developed nations do exactly that. After all every "right" is just something doled about by a government - nature has no such concept as fundamental human rights.
Canada is indeed weird in that it heavily restricts private healthcare - although the extent to which it is forbidden varies by province. The argument made is that if private care were allowed rich politicians would be less likely to properly fund the system. I agree that this a completely daft argument - especially since we are so close to the US and the rich can just go and get treated there. However this is an oddity unique (as far as I am aware) to Canada. In the UK both private and public systems operate and you can purchase insurance which lets you skip waiting lists and have private hospital rooms etc. which is a far better system than the Canadian one.
All health systems have flaws. In Canada and the UK the issue is with waiting times and convenience. In the US my worry was always about what was covered especially since the insurance at the university I worked has a lifetime maximum which seemed insanely large until we saw the bill for the birth of our first kid which was more than my annual salary at the time! For me personally, as an academic who would almost certainly have health coverage, the US system is clearly better for me so long as I would have always have coverage which, as costs rise, becomes more and more problematic. However the US system excludes millions from any sort of coverage and many have conditions which are not properly covered or which have large co-pays they cannot afford. So for a civilized society which looks after its citizens a free-to-use national health care system is far, far better.
I might turn the hotel television on once or twice in a month. Television is unwatchable these days.
It depends on where you travel to. US television is indeed unwatchable due to the ad breaks but if you happen to visit Europe and they have the BBC channels those are entirely ad free and even the commercial UK channels only have 2 breaks per 1 hour programme (or one per 30 minute programme).
Actually if you had a national health system like just about every other developed nation on the planet you would not need any special treatment for astronauts because just like everyone else they would get free health care. The statement should not be that it's about time astronauts get healthcare for life it should be that it's about time everyone gets healthcare for life.
Even the loopback address can get you into trouble. When I was a grad student we had a technician who got into severe trouble because of it. It turns out that he was using the university computers to look at ordinary porn sites but, unbeknowst to him, the university had tried to block access by fixing the local DNS records of some sites to point to the loopback address. This was in the days of FTP rather than the web and so while hunting for files on his "porn site" he found the local/etc/passwd file with all our encrypted passwords in it (/etc/shadow was not around then either!). Thinking he had found evidence that our machines had been hacked he reported this without thinking about what his FTP command history plus the DNS name he used for the site would give away. Of course it was not helped by a group of us grad students who'd been initially trying to figure it what was going on while he fetched the sysadmin bursting out laughing when we figured it out while the sysadmin stormed off angrily to tell the group's leader!
It's actually worse since the youngest you will have a degree in Canada is 21 years old so only the final three years of the range will contain any graduates.
Really? I think that depends on how you define "unreasonable" - or rather it depends on how a judge defines it and given what the US has been up do in recent years I would not trust a US judge's definition to match with mine.
It's a "time crystal" in the sense that the quantum states of the structure exhibit a precisely recurring pattern in time.
So it is a crystal where the oscillations are synchronized, or at least that's how most physicists would describe it if they were not trying to hype it up and make it sound cool. Perhaps we could try this with 1st year physics: by the same logic we can describe waves on a string as "time waves" because each point on the string moves over time and is synchronized to each other point via a constant phase difference.
Except that Java is incredibly slow and cannot adapt to local devices well. A far better example is a VM image. These now run at close to native speeds and you can customize te GUI as you see fit. We already have cloud computing that uses VMs to allow anyone to run anything on shared resources. I expect that this will grow and spread. Whether it will get as far as the article suggests I have no idea but I expect it will go a lot further than it has already.
No we have not yet seen this form of matter. It was claimed to have been observed a while ago but this was disproved. Let's hope the same thing does not happen again.
Computers were first built back in the 40's... we didn't get them into the home until the 70's.
The computers built in the 1940's used valves, not silicon. The first transistor-based computers were in the early 1950's so that's when the clock should start ticking since valve-based computers were clearly never going to be a consumer item. The same may be true of the next generation of computer technology - the current tech for quantum computers is not really consumer friendly if that turns out to be the next generation technological platform.
Way too vague, neither "disrupt" or "continued unauthorized activity" not defined; this'd very quickly result in these so-called victims in just using DDoS against anyone who they disagree with
Even a strict interpretation will lead to an eHolocaust. Attacker hijacks a machine in company A and uses it to attack company B. Company B retaliates against the machine in company A. Company A detects attack from company B and returns the favour. Multiply that by all the machines in a botnet and you can kiss goodbye to the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
None like the various religions depict, at least.
Indeed but genesis almost got it right although to be more accurate it should have been:
Then god wrote, "bool light=true;", and there was light.
In other words, "the universe is a simulation" is an unevidenced assertion, much like the multiverse.
It is far worse than that because unless we find the programmer(s) (or possibly a bug/exploit!) there will never be any evidence of the simulation. In this way believing in a simulation is just like a religion - there is literally no difference because the only way to scientifically prove a religion is to find evidence of god. Everything which religious fundamentalists explain as "god creating it that way" a simulation can explain by "the programmer(s) creating it that way" and QM is not a problem in that regard if you are simulating the universe itself because outside the simulation we have no idea what the physical laws are so we can literally just invoke magic.
The arguments made in the article about QM are not obstacles (and in some cases very poorly explained e.g. the spin of an electron is exactly known at all times because it is a fermion and has a spin-1/2, what is not known is the direction the spin vector points) because even if we restrict ourselves to the type of computers we know about they are easily solved by simply saying that the simulation is pre-determined. You can reproduce all QM phenomena, and indeed any phenomena you can imagine, this way. However since the simulation runs in a universe we know nothing about the limitations on such a computer are utterly unknown. Hence belief in a simulation is unfalsifiable and so not a scientific theory but a belief.
Not exactly. After all, you can't measure how "fast" or "slow" something "passes" except by doing so... over time. Which leads to a bit of a circular definition.
Not really. Time is always determined as the period between two events just as space is always measured as the distance between two physical objects. If you have a physical process that you know takes a fixed amount of time to happen then, when you look at it in the moving frame, it will take longer to happen so, relative to you, time has been slowed down...or more correctly now partly coincides with one of your space directions. However since you now only perceive part of their taime axis as being parallel to your own it does mean that time is slowed for them relative to you.
Slow it down is not the same as stop, and "will stop" is a prediction.
Yes a prediction based on existing physical laws...welcome to a physics discussion this is what they generally involve: extrapolation of existing physics to situations you can dream up.
Really saddens me that you use an if statement in a physics discussion.
Don't be sad! Again this is a very common statement in physics discussions because of their nature. One of the fundamental reasons physics is so useful is that it can make predictions such as "if in situation X then Y will happen" so if statements are infused throughout physics discussions and as already mentioned they are based on extrapolating existing, experimentally well established laws to a particular situation.
You are pontificating.
Try looking up what pontificating means. I was not stating opinions but facts and stating facts which counter your beliefs might annoy you but that still does not make them opinions.
If people are upset about all this, perhaps our elected representatives can change the laws?
The problem with this is that these companies have an army of lawyers trying to find holes in whatever laws are passed. They can find these holes faster than laws can be patched because governments have to tread carefully to make sure new laws do not accidentally penalize companies who are behaving themselves. The only way I can see governments defeating this is by giving themselves far more discretionary taxation power to target individual companies than they currently have and that can lead to abuse of that power if we are not careful.
We cannot "stop" time.
Actually we can slow it down: time passes more slowly for an object moving at a high velocity relative to the observer. In the limit that this approaches the speed of light in a vacuum time will stop.
We cannot evaluate the opposite of time, or "not-time".
Yes we can. If the flow of time reversed we could do experiments which would unambiguously determine this. The oscillation of kaons and B-mesons show that physics is not the same if time is reversed. This is called T-violation and is closely associated with the difference between matter and anti-matter, something called CP-violation.
We cannot directly "measure" time. We cannot directly "see" time. If we cannot evaluate these things, does time exist?
Exactly the same applies to space: we "see" and "measure" space by looking at the physical separation between things in the same way that we "see" and "measure" time by detecting the time between events. Space is as real as time - it clearly exists because events happen at different times in the just the same way that they do not happen at the same place. In a universe with no matter or energy then there would be no way to detect the presence of space or time but then there would be nothing there to ponder their existence either.
For example, if you aren't looking at something in a video game it doesn't get rendered, ergo schrodingers cat like phenomena. The moon in fact is not there if you don't look at it.
This is NOT AT ALL how quantum mechanics works. Schrodinger's Cat was a gedanken experiment developed by Schrodinger to show how absurd the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was when applied to everyday objects. Absolutely no physicist believes that this is how QM actually works: the cat is simply either alive or it is dead and is not in a superposition of two states. The point was to show that the prevailing interpretation at the time was wrong. The same goes for the world: QM does not say that things stop existing if they are not observed and nobody believes this. QM is strange and counter-intuitive, it is not crazy!
Why? Isn't an innovation that makes it easier to distribute content in higher quality an innovation, even if you can't tell the difference?
Yes technically it is an innovation but unless it does something to improve the cinema experience why do I care? It is like the innovation of circular tea bags. Yes this is technically an innovation and yes it will temporarily boost sales but only until everyone figures out that it makes no difference whatsoever and goes back to what they were doing before. What a lot of people seem to forget is that it is not innovation we want it is useful innovation.
What about digital distribution of digital content displayed via huge digital display systems?
It basically looks just the same as that from a film. It might save the cinema money but it does nothing for the customer. There is pseudo-3D I suppose but that shrinks the screen and gives many people a splitting headache after a few minutes. So I suppose the criterion should be innovation that is good for the customer.
At some point, someone has to be the grownup in the room and say "you know, that would be really nice, but we simply can't afford it".
There is another alternative so solve that if what you are going to cut is really important: you can raise taxes. However I understand that Trump wants to lower taxes and apparently by cutting basic science. That's a very short term strategy. It may take a decade or two but if you fall behind the rest of the world in science you are handing us a huge economic advantage....errr...so forget I said anything, this sounds like a great plan!
The students sued because the lectures were not available in a suitable format to meet the requirements of the ADA.
This would explain why, when I upload my own lectures from Canada, YouTube always wants to know that they have never been aired in the US prior to release.
Well, like Apple, Swatch seem make product names by sticking a letter in front so surely this will make it sOS?
It's amazing how most copyright trolls are targeting people for downloading utter pieces of crap that no one would every pay a cent to see.
What's surprising about that? They clearly are not going to make money from people voluntarily paying to see these films are they?
The exception in the statement "just about every other" is of course Switzerland
Really? When I lived in Switzerland everyone I knew thought the cost of health insurance was insanely expensive - certainly compared to just over the border in France. More recently when we have been paying the costs for postdocs and their families the costs have similarly been extremely expensive. It might be cheaper than the US but the US health costs are just insane - compare it to other European countries and I think you will find it looks very expensive.
Stop saying a national healthcare system is a free healthcare system. It isn't. Healthcare is not a right that governments can simply dole out
National health care IS a free system to those who need it. Obviously it is paid for by tax payers but their money goes purely to providing healthcare and not also to provide profit for shareholders. It absolutely IS a right that governments can simply dole out and the overwhelming majority of governments in developed nations do exactly that. After all every "right" is just something doled about by a government - nature has no such concept as fundamental human rights.
Canada is indeed weird in that it heavily restricts private healthcare - although the extent to which it is forbidden varies by province. The argument made is that if private care were allowed rich politicians would be less likely to properly fund the system. I agree that this a completely daft argument - especially since we are so close to the US and the rich can just go and get treated there. However this is an oddity unique (as far as I am aware) to Canada. In the UK both private and public systems operate and you can purchase insurance which lets you skip waiting lists and have private hospital rooms etc. which is a far better system than the Canadian one.
All health systems have flaws. In Canada and the UK the issue is with waiting times and convenience. In the US my worry was always about what was covered especially since the insurance at the university I worked has a lifetime maximum which seemed insanely large until we saw the bill for the birth of our first kid which was more than my annual salary at the time! For me personally, as an academic who would almost certainly have health coverage, the US system is clearly better for me so long as I would have always have coverage which, as costs rise, becomes more and more problematic. However the US system excludes millions from any sort of coverage and many have conditions which are not properly covered or which have large co-pays they cannot afford. So for a civilized society which looks after its citizens a free-to-use national health care system is far, far better.
I might turn the hotel television on once or twice in a month. Television is unwatchable these days.
It depends on where you travel to. US television is indeed unwatchable due to the ad breaks but if you happen to visit Europe and they have the BBC channels those are entirely ad free and even the commercial UK channels only have 2 breaks per 1 hour programme (or one per 30 minute programme).
Actually if you had a national health system like just about every other developed nation on the planet you would not need any special treatment for astronauts because just like everyone else they would get free health care. The statement should not be that it's about time astronauts get healthcare for life it should be that it's about time everyone gets healthcare for life.
Even the loopback address can get you into trouble. When I was a grad student we had a technician who got into severe trouble because of it. It turns out that he was using the university computers to look at ordinary porn sites but, unbeknowst to him, the university had tried to block access by fixing the local DNS records of some sites to point to the loopback address. This was in the days of FTP rather than the web and so while hunting for files on his "porn site" he found the local /etc/passwd file with all our encrypted passwords in it (/etc/shadow was not around then either!). Thinking he had found evidence that our machines had been hacked he reported this without thinking about what his FTP command history plus the DNS name he used for the site would give away. Of course it was not helped by a group of us grad students who'd been initially trying to figure it what was going on while he fetched the sysadmin bursting out laughing when we figured it out while the sysadmin stormed off angrily to tell the group's leader!
It's actually worse since the youngest you will have a degree in Canada is 21 years old so only the final three years of the range will contain any graduates.
The US constitution (4th am.) would prevent this.
Really? I think that depends on how you define "unreasonable" - or rather it depends on how a judge defines it and given what the US has been up do in recent years I would not trust a US judge's definition to match with mine.
It's a "time crystal" in the sense that the quantum states of the structure exhibit a precisely recurring pattern in time.
So it is a crystal where the oscillations are synchronized, or at least that's how most physicists would describe it if they were not trying to hype it up and make it sound cool. Perhaps we could try this with 1st year physics: by the same logic we can describe waves on a string as "time waves" because each point on the string moves over time and is synchronized to each other point via a constant phase difference.
We've already got that. It's called Java.
Except that Java is incredibly slow and cannot adapt to local devices well. A far better example is a VM image. These now run at close to native speeds and you can customize te GUI as you see fit. We already have cloud computing that uses VMs to allow anyone to run anything on shared resources. I expect that this will grow and spread. Whether it will get as far as the article suggests I have no idea but I expect it will go a lot further than it has already.
No we have not yet seen this form of matter. It was claimed to have been observed a while ago but this was disproved. Let's hope the same thing does not happen again.
Computers were first built back in the 40's... we didn't get them into the home until the 70's.
The computers built in the 1940's used valves, not silicon. The first transistor-based computers were in the early 1950's so that's when the clock should start ticking since valve-based computers were clearly never going to be a consumer item. The same may be true of the next generation of computer technology - the current tech for quantum computers is not really consumer friendly if that turns out to be the next generation technological platform.
Way too vague, neither "disrupt" or "continued unauthorized activity" not defined; this'd very quickly result in these so-called victims in just using DDoS against anyone who they disagree with
Even a strict interpretation will lead to an eHolocaust. Attacker hijacks a machine in company A and uses it to attack company B. Company B retaliates against the machine in company A. Company A detects attack from company B and returns the favour. Multiply that by all the machines in a botnet and you can kiss goodbye to the internet.