A New “Theory of Everything”: Reality Emerges from Cosmic Copyright Law

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-theory-of-everything-reality-emerges-from-cosmic-copyright-law/

by jonbaer • 12 years ago

81 50 12 years ago

I'm a big Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fan, but I'm always bothered whenever this quote surfaces:

Once you have eliminated the impossible,” the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes famously opined, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

This is terrible advice, even more so when mentioned in a scientific publication. This recommendation is the antithesis of what the scientific method is about and a text book example of an argument from ignorance.

You don't pick an explanation because you have run out of ideas to explain a phenomenon, for the simple reason that there might be other explanations you have not considered.

The time to believe something is when there is evidence to back it up.

yohanatan• 12 years ago

In the context of murder investigations, perhaps it is easier to form a complete set of possible explanations before applying that principle? That's how I always read it at least.

pdkl952• 12 years ago

The key word in that quote is "eliminated". Try this more modern translation:

"Once you have falsified every other possible hypothesis, whatever hypothesis remains is the one we'll promote to a theory."

Holmes' is not saying you get to just make things up - he's trying to explain that instead of trying to prove something directly, inverting your perspective and falsifying as many incorrect interpretations ("the impossible") should always work - even if yo don't understand why.

That quote is an incredibly efficient summarization of the scientific method's core philosophy that (because you can't prove a positive), you falsify wrong hypothesis instead.

zak_mc_kracken3• 12 years ago

That quote is an incredibly efficient summarization of the scientific method's core philosophy that (because you can't prove a positive), you falsify wrong hypothesis instead.

I disagree and I'll repeat what I said above: this is the antithesis of the scientific method. It's faith based and it opens the door to accepting hypotheses that have zero evidence to back them up. Follow this reasoning and you can just make things up.

mantrax52• 12 years ago

Indeed. Plus, there's another subtle moment in science. It just creates models which are good at matching observations and making predictions.

Many mutually conflicting models can be created to describe the same properties of the same system.

We have no way of ever finding the "truth".

adrianN3• 12 years ago

That implies that there is a priviledged truth. If two theories are completely indistinguishable by any conceivable experiment, then I would consider them both to be equally "true".

sp332• 12 years ago

That's not how it's being interpreted here though. Everything that could possibly happen in the universe does happen, which means that anything which does not happen must be impossible. So we should go find all the rules that make things impossible, and we will be able to predict what will happen from what's left.

marknadal• 12 years ago

“In principle, everything possible in our universe could be written down in a big book consisting of nothing but tasks [and in] this big book will also be encoded all of the laws of physics.”

This is hardly a grand "Theory of Everything" and a lot more like a messy rule book of exceptions and edge cases, that attempts to cover all rules for classical and quantum systems.

Terr_• 12 years ago

So... The "just because" theory of existence?

Fuxy• 12 years ago

This article is hella confusing and in an attempt to dumb it down for average people to understand lost the entire meaning of the analogy.

The paper probably makes more sense than the explanation of it.

terminalcommand• 12 years ago

Well, I'd like to read the published paper. Anyone who is interested in quantum computing comes to his/hers analogies and beliefs of the underlying laws of the universe. The discussions on digital physics have been around since Zuse. I can't see why they claim that they have found something groundbreaking. In my opinion, this theory is closer to philosophy rather than quantum mechanics.

saint-loup• 12 years ago

David Deutsch, coauthor of the paper, is not without credibility in the field of quantum computing, to say the least. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch

It's obviously a speculative theory, but it's a welcomed endeavor, since the field is sorely lacking conceptual frameworks to make sense of scientific advances.

Link to the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563

Snail_Commando• 12 years ago

Per `dang's suggestion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7803158, here's the link to the paper so that we may consolidate the threads:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563

Edited to steal more screenspace/add context:

Authors:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120402224250/http://193.189.74...

http://edge.org/memberbio/chiara_marletto

You may also be interested in this paper:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantu...

Also, http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory

michaelfeathers• 12 years ago

I laughed when I saw that used the name of a C++ for the theory.

The word 'constructor' may have been used in niche places before it was adopted by the language but I've never seen it used outside of it.

mooism2• 12 years ago

Lots of languages have constructors. Some of them aren't even object oriented.

chriswarbo• 12 years ago

Indeed, the wording of the article even made me think of type theory and functional programming.

For instance, a kettle with a power supply can serve as a constructor that can perform the task of heating water.

kettle power_supply water : (water * heat)

You simply say that the task of creating energy from nothing is impossible.

first_law : (Null -> energy) = _|_

In principle, everything possible in our universe could be written down in a big book consisting of nothing but tasks

This sounds like an enumeration (eg. a Goedel numbering) of programs, or alternatively of a (program, runtime) quarter-plane.

The collaborators then go on to define the concept of a “superinformation” medium that encodes messages that specify particular physical states—in this case, one in which copying is impossible

Sounds like substructural type systems and linear (or affine) types.

nl• 12 years ago

It's frequently used outside computer programming. For example, "who was the constructor of the Panama canal" was easy to find with Google autocomplete.

It's used quite a bit in the construction industry.

rollthehard6• 12 years ago

Not a follower of F1 then? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Formula_One_World_Const...

skore• 12 years ago

Always love to see new ideas from my apparently-alternate-universe, yet equally-named human copy. What a brilliant mind! Keeps reminding me to seek for deeper answers.

Really a shame that they went for such a strangely click-baity title for what was otherwise a good article, though. This has nothing to do with Copyright and nowhere does the article even attempt to hold up the terrible metaphor.

bencollier49• 12 years ago

Can any physicists on here tell me if this new theory actually predicts anything? Is it falsifiable?

macspoofing• 12 years ago

Falsifiability is so last century (http://edge.org/response-detail/25322) =)

pessimizer• 12 years ago

Ick. Thanks for the link.

aninhumer• 12 years ago

I don't really understand the argument here. It starts to explain a difference between "falsifiable" and "empirical", but then it goes off on an example that I don't understand at all.

Imagining an unobservable multiverse might be a useful way to think about a problem, and it might lead to an elegant way to make predictions, but all we can conclude from that scientifically is "the universe behaves as if there were a multiverse". There's no need to assert that such a multiverse actually exists, and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor.

If the article wants to argue that sometimes describing observable behaviour in terms of unobservable entities is neater than the alternative, that's entirely reasonable. But it seems to me that it's trying to argue that the existence of a multiverse is something unfalsifiable that's still scientific, and I don't agree with that at all.

But maybe I'm just misunderstanding something, I don't know that much about theoretical physics after all.

yxhuvud2• 12 years ago

So if I understand this correctly, this seems a bit similar to how math is built upon a defined set of axioms, which the rest is then derived from.

Given that the axioms they choose are powerful enough, this approach should yield falsifiable results, because if a result turns out to be false, then one of the axioms will turn out not to apply.

anbu32• 12 years ago

Lubos Motl has written a pretty harsh takedown:

http://motls.blogspot.no/2014/05/constructor-theory-deutsch-...

Gravityloss• 12 years ago

I see he's still as obnoxious like always. He makes points, though I'm not qualified to say whether they are valid. I wish he could be more restrained.

That said, if someone like David Deutsch publishes such theories with grand predictions, they deserve criticism.

orbifold• 12 years ago

I scanned the paper and I feel like most of the criticism by Motl is more or less justified. They introduce non-standard notation for things that would probably benefit from a treatment within well established mathematical language. For example their discussion of non clonability of "superinformation", whatever that is, could probably be resolved by working within a non-cartesian monoidal category (which is a standard tool in Quantum logic).

mmusson• 12 years ago

Admittedly, you could post this comment on nearly any physics topic.

restless• 12 years ago

"it isn't easy to ignore Lubos, but it is always worth it" if he could just be a little more on the topic, instead of insulting everyone, his legitimate critiscm would a far greater value.

habosa• 12 years ago

According to constructor theory, the most fundamental components of reality are entities—“constructors”—that perform particular tasks, accompanied by a set of laws that define which tasks are actually possible for a constructor to carry out. For instance, a kettle with a power supply can serve as a constructor that can perform the task of heating water .... “You simply say that the task of creating energy from nothing is impossible.”

Looks like someone is getting into OOP:

    // Defined
    (new Kettle()).boil(new Water());

    // Exception
    Universe.createEnergyFrom(null)

(yes, I'm joking with this post. But I did find the parallel to be funny)

superqd• 12 years ago

I think it's more than a parallel.

jamiek88• 12 years ago

The whole 'universe as simulation' idea is spooky.

A New “Theory of Everything”: Reality Emerges from Cosmic Copyright Law

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