Quantum realism is the inverse of physical realism, because it makes the quantum world real and thephysical world imaginary, rather than the reverse. It is a paradigm shift, just as when we shifted from thinking that the sun orbits the earth to realize that the earth orbits the sun. Paradigm shifts are accepted in stages because they challenge traditional ideas. The first stage is to overcome Occam’s razor, that the traditional view is simpler. The second is to show that traditional foundations are faulty. Only then, if the new paradigm is simpler and better founded, will it be scientifically tested. Yet the biggest obstacle to a valid paradigm shift is the belief that we already have all the answers.
The way of science, in a nutshell, is to assume a theory is true then see if it predicts what happens. If it works, we accept it, if it doesn’t, we reject it. This is how quantum theory arose. In contrast, the way of faith is to find facts that support a belief and ignore those that don’t.
Computing is a science because it designs a logical model, implements it, then tests it against expectations. Design science uses this approach, as information systems are designed in theory, built in practice, then tested against requirements, in an iterative process (Hevner et al., 2004).
Reverse engineering is a subset of design science that discovers the processes behind an application. The method is to first specify the outputs, best-guess the processes involved, then check the outputs predicted against those observed, and repeat until consistently correct. Quantum simulations use this method to predict atomic events. Note that the proposed design must be falsifiable.
Reverse engineering the physical world then involves the following steps:
1. Specify: Specify the physical world outputs (physics).
2. Design: Design processes that could produce those outputs (computer science).
3. Validate: Compare expected with actual outputs (experiments).
The consistency constraint is critical, as while it is easy to satisfy one requirement, satisfying many is much harder. In addition, the design should:
1. Follow best practices. Use established computer science principles.
2. Satisfy Occam’s razor. Given a design choice, take the simpler option.
The aim is to derive the laws of physics from processing first principles, step by step. A scientific theory can’t choose what it explains, so this method must explain all current physics, including space, time, energy, matter, gravity, magnetism, spin, and charge. Cherry-picking cases to show that selected programs mimic some world properties isn’t a new kind of science but an old kind of bias (Wolfram, 2002). Reverse engineering the physical world could reveal this approach to be:
1. Spurious. Spurious models add no value because they need new assumptions or parameters to explain every new fact.
2. Coincidental. Coincidental models work for a while, by luck, but fail over time, as they cherry-pick cases to support the model and ignore those that contradict it.
3 Useful. Useful models aren’t actually true, but are stepping-stones to new research that increases knowledge.
4. Valid. Valid models not only match observed reality in many ways, but also predict new effects that contradict established models and are later found to be true.
If physics describes physical events and computer science describes processing events, whether the physical world is generated by quantum processes is a question that design science can evaluate.
Science is a way to ask questions of external reality, not a set of fixed ideas about it:
“Science is not about building a body of known ‘facts’. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.” (Pratchett et al., 1999)
Science doesn’t tell us what the physical world is but how to study it, by limiting the questions we ask to those that observation can check. Hence, theories about a multiverse (Tegmark, 1997), or saving and restoring reality(Schmidhuber, 1997), or that virtual realities nest (Bostrom, 2002), are speculations beyond the scope of science because they can’t be tested by observation. In contrast, that the physical world is virtual is a statement about this world that science can test by observation, as will be shown.
Science works by contrasting mutually exclusive theories with respect to the observed evidence and rejecting the least likely, so theories must be falsifiable. Virtualism is falsifiable because any incomputable physics would disprove it:
“… the hypothesis that our universe is a program running on a digital computer in another universe generates empirical predictions, and is therefore falsifiable” (McCabe, 2005) p1
If the physical world wasn’t computable, it couldn’t be virtual, but it is. Physical realism is falsifiable too, although its falsifications are called unsolved mysteries (Aspect et al., 1982).
Quantum theory is a science because it is testable by observation, even though quantum waves aren’t physical. Being able to observe what a theory describes isn’t a demand of science, and never has been:
“Atomism began life as a philosophical idea that would fail virtually every contemporary test of what should be regarded as ‘scientific’; yet, eventually, it became the cornerstone of physical science.”(Barrow, 2007) p3
Current physics has unobservable quarks, invisible fields, and virtual particles, so it can hardly make visibility a demand of science. There is no need, as science only requires a theory to predict observables, not to be about them. For example, that our universe began long ago is accepted by science based on the evidence, even though we can never observe it. If science can decide that our universe began based on the evidence, it can decide if it is virtual or not. Quantum realism doesn’t contradict science but engages its spirit of enquiry.
How can science evaluate quantum realism? The method proposed is to reverse engineer the physical world based on design science, which follows the way of science.
“In June 2005, QiuChengwei, a Chinese national, won a virtual sword in the online game Legend of Mir 3. He lent the sword to a fellow gamer Zhu Caoyuan who subsequently sold it [on eBay]. When Qiu reported the incident to the police, he was told a virtual sword was not real property and was not protected by law. Qiu went to the home of Zhu and stabbed him to death in a very real crime for which he is now serving a life sentence.” (Power, 2010) p188
The Mir sword didn’t physically exist but it was real enough for people to own, sell, and kill for, so for all practical purposes, it was real. Bitcoins don’t physically exist either, so are they unreal? If reality is what exists physically, then bitcoins worth billions of dollars aren’t real! Clearly that isn’t right, so let us define reality as what exists to an observer.
Adding the observer to the definition works because every physical event has an observer in quantum theory. This definition lets a dream to be real to a dreamer but not to others. It isn’t solipsism, that we create all reality, but that we each construct our own reality. The advantage is to let fields like sociology, psychology, and computing study social, experiential, and information systems that are real. For if information wasn’t real, or if cognition wasn’t real, or if society wasn’t real, the sciences of computing, psychology, and sociology would be the study of unreality. It also lets scientists study computers in informational, experiential, and social terms (Whitworth & Ahmad, 2013).
Figure 1.5. The observations of science
In Figure 1.5, the observations of science emerge from physical events, so an engineer can see a cell phone as hardware while a programmer sees it as software. There is one reality, the phone, but engineers and programmers can view it differently. We can see hardware to solve a hardware problem, or software to solve a software problem.
Thus, hardware can exist without software but software can’t exist without hardware, because it emerges from it. In general, social structures emerged from human experiences (Bone, 2005) that emerged from nerve information that emerged from brain events because seeing reality in social terms helped us survive (Hogg, 1990). Science is based on observations that can change with the subject.
The Mir sword didn’t exist physically but it was an information entity in the Mir database, a cognitive entity experienced by its owner, and a social entity in the Mir community, so it was real in these terms. If a fantasy is real to only one person, the Mir sword was not that. It existed by common consent and was even a scientific subject of research. In a society, to sell what one doesn’t own is unjust, so as the police had no remedy, the owner took justice into his own hands.
In Figure 1.5, a group or nation isn’t a thing, it is an observation of shared experiences. An experience isn’t a thing, it is an observation of brain information. And information isn’t a thing, it is a way of observing physical events. Current physics makes matter the basis of all reality views but virtualism questions this assumption, by suggesting that a thing isn’t a thing either, just a view of quantum reality.
Quantum realism argues that all reality derives from quantum reality as a view. As the great eighteenth century philosopher Kant concluded, we only ever see phenomena, views of reality, not noumena, or reality itself (Kant, 2002). In Figure 1.6, physical reality emerges from quantum reality, so it exists when we look but not when we don’t.
Figure 1.6 Physical reality emerges from quantum reality
Our observer-observed reality isn’t objectively real, but is a world based on images necessarily fake? Imagine looking at yourself in a mirror. You see your body in the mirror but if you don’t look, the image doesn’t exist. It is objectively unreal, because nothing exists where the image apparently is, but we take it as real because it shows us how we look. It follows that an image that reflects realityisn’t fake, even if it doesn’t exist objectively.
If images that reflect reality aren’t fake, a virtual world isn’t fake if it reflects real quantum causes, so this world isn’t a movie made-up, or a dream imagined, but a reflection of quantum reality.
Quantum reality is the base of Figure 1.6 because it provides the observer. Each reality level leads to the next, just as in Figure 1.5, but now the base is quantum not physical. Physical events emerge from quantum events just as information emerges from physical events. It follows that we live in a local reality (1.2.6) not a fake one, where what we see, like the Mir sword, is locally real but not objectively so.
This book began when I wondered why the maximum speed in our world is that of light. Einstein deduced that nothing can go faster than light from the facts, but didn’t explain why. Objective things could just go faster and faster, so why can’t they? The thought then occurred that perhaps the speed of light is a screen limit, just as my computer screen can only run at a certain speed.
In a virtual world, space is measured in screen pixels and time is measured in processing cycles. Asking what happens between cycles or pixels is like asking what happens to a movie between its frames, or a picture between its dots, when neither movie nor picture exist then. A movie running 70 frames a second seems continuous to us because our eyes only refresh 30 times a second. Likewise, a physical universe that refreshes at 1043 times a second seemed continuous to our instruments until recently. Planck length and time are the pixels and cycles of our virtual reality.
If so, the maximum transfer rate from one point to the next is one pixel per cycle, or Planck length divided by Planck time, which is indeed the speed of light. The values we use, like 186,000 miles per second, or 299,792,458 meters per second, just reflect our units, but in quantum units, the speed of light is simply one.
It follows that the refresh rate of screen of space limits its transfer rate to one pixel per cycle, which is the speed of light.
Current physics can’t explain why light waves travel at a fixed speed in empty space. Wave speed should vary with the medium, so the speed of a water wave depends on the elasticity of water. Nineteenth century scientists expected light to be the same, so its speed should depend on an ether that fills space. But the earth orbits the sun at 108,000 km per hour, and the sun goes round the galaxy even faster, so we can’t be stationary relative to that ether (Figure 1.4). It follows that the speed of light should vary with its direction but in 1887 Michelson and Morley discovered that it was the same in every direction, so there was no physical ether.
Einstein then traded Newton’s absolute space and time for an equally absolute space-time where:
“…absolute space-time is as absolute for special relativity as absolute space and absolute time were for Newton …” (Greene, 2004, p51)
He changed the question from how light vibrates empty space to how it vibrates a space-time matrix, even though the latter gives no basis for elasticity either. In an example of reverse logic, the speed of light is now said to define the elasticity of space, so a wave can define its medium of travel. The theory was fitted to the facts, which is backwards science!
To understand the problem, imagine a space that contains objects as an ocean contains fishes:
1. Any object in that space needs a not-that-object boundary to be an object.
2. Unless there are only objects, there must also be a “not-any-object”, i.e. empty space.
3. If that space is nothing at all, then only objects exist, so there is no basis for movement.
4. If that space exists as objects do, the logic returns to #1, so it needs another “space” to exist in.
Objects need a space boundary to exist but if that space is nothing at all, they can’t move, or if it is something, what bounds it? The buck of thingness must stop somewhere and for us space is it. The paradox is that space can’t be nothing, nor can it exist as the objects within it do. In a purely physical world, space is nothing at all, but both Einstein and Newton realized that was impossible:
“According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such a space there would not only be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time …” (Einstein, 1920, in May 5th address at the University of Leyden)
Einstein’s ether isn’t the physical one that Michelson and Morley dismissed, but a medium that acts like nothing but is something. A physical ether has been discredited, but a non-physical one has not:
“Since 1905 when Einstein first did away with the luminiferous aether, the idea that space is filled with invisible substances has waged a vigorous comeback.” (Greene, 2004) p76
It follows that while space physically acts like nothing, it must actually be something, as the Casimir effect, that space exerts a pressure, suggests.
In contrast, an idle computer doesn’t sit idle but runs a null process [1], so even if one isn’t pressing keys or moving the mouse, a 4 GHz computer still cycles about 4,000 times a second. Empty space as null processing has no output but it isn’t nothing, so it can generate a space that objects move in.
Matter doesn’t have a null element but quantum processing does, so it can not only output an electron or photon but also empty space by null processing. It is like a screen that can show an image or not, but a blank screen without images is still active. Only turning the screen off stops it, but that also destroys any images on it, so if the screen of space turned off, our entire universe would disappear instantly, and humanity with it.
It follows that empty space is not empty at all but full of null processing.
[1] Null processing is the program that a processing unit runs when it is doing “nothing”.
When you start a computer, it has to boot up, so could our universe have started like that? Last century scientists thought that our universe had always existed, so its parts could transform but the whole was in a steady state. They felt, quite reasonably, that a whole universe expanding from a point was unlikely. But then in 1929, the astronomer Hubble discovered that all the stars and galaxies around us are speeding apart from a first event that occurred billions of years ago, and finding the cosmic afterglow of that event around us confirmed it. There had been what the press called a “big bang”.
This put physics in a quandary, as a universe that is all there is can’t just “begin”. Either something else made it, or it made itself, or it came from nothing. If something else made it, as parents make a child, then it isn’t all there is. If it made itself, it had to exist before its own creation, which is impossible. And that it came from nothing denies both physics and logic. That a complete system just began has no rational explanation.
Yet that our universe is both complete and began is oddly enough what most physicists believe today. Parmenides concluded that Nihil fit ex nihilo (From nothing, nothing comes) but physics now believes that from nothing everything came. Calling the initial nothing “something that fluctuates” (Atkins, 2011) doesn’t help because nothing can’t fluctuate. The first event couldn’t have been a “quantum fluctuation of the vacuum” because it also began space, so if matter just popped out of space, what did space pop out of? If the idea that our universe exploded from a point of nothing is irrational, how is the creation story of science today better than what came before?
The current reply to the question “What was there before the big bang?” is that before then there was no time, but defining away a question doesn’t answer it. A universe that began had to start somehow, so it is valid to ask “How did it begin?” For if time just began at some moment, could it suddenly stop today for the same reason? The key questions are:
How did matter begin, with no time or space for it to begin in?
How did space begin, with no time for it to exist in?
How did time begin, with no space for it to flow in?
That our physical universe made itself is impossible and that it came from nothing is inconceivable. In contrast, every virtual reality begins with a “big bang” that creates both its objects and its space and time. When Sim City boots up, nothing in that world began it, and before that event, the time and space of Sim City didn’t exist.
It follows that the big bang was when our virtual universe booted up.
For a computer’s output to also be its only input is a circularity that can crash it. The result is an infinite loop that can’t be stopped so, in simple terms, it hangs. But our universe is constantly changing so it can’t be locked in an infinite loop. Logically, the physical world can no more compute itself than two hands can draw each other (Figure 1.3).
It is equally glib for physicists to talk of quantum processing occurring in space and time:
“Imagine the quantum computation embedded in space and time. Each logic gate now sites at a point in space and time, and the wires represent physical paths along which the quantum bits flow from one point to another.” (Lloyd, 1999) p172.
To embed quantum processing in a fixed space and time contradicts relativity, because it doesn’t allow a fixed space or time. But what began our universe also began its space and time, so if quantum processing did that, it can’t exist in the space and time it created. Only processing that isn’t embedded in our world’s space or time can generate it as a virtual reality.
But could processing create our universe? If our universe is virtual, it must be finite, because what is infinite can’t be computed, and the evidence suggests that it is. Equally all the laws of physics must be calculable, which again they are. An abstract like pi (π) can be infinite as long as it doesn’t represent a physical thing, which it doesn’t. So, our universe could be:
Calculable:Scientists accept that processing could calculate physical reality based on the Church-Turing thesis, that a finite program can simulate any specifiable output (Tegmark, 2007). This is not determinism, as not all definable mathematics is calculable, e.g. an infinite series. If our world is specifiable, even probabilistically, in theory a program could output it. The idea isn’t that our universe is virtual but that it could be. This option would be falsified by a non-computable law of physics but none has ever been found. Indeed, our world has an algorithmic simplicity beyond all expectations:
“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.” (Wigner, 1960)
Calculating: That some sort of calculating creates physical events is supported by many academics, including main-stream physicists like Wheeler, whose “It from Bit” suggests that processing (bit) can somehow create matter (it). Now processing doesn’t just model the universe, it can cause it (Piccinini, 2007).
Calculated: That processing actually does cause physical reality is the final step, but few in physics support this “strong” view, that the universe really is a calculated output (Fredkin, 1990).
These statements cumulate as each assumes the previous, so what isn’t calculable can’t be produced by calculating, and what can’t be produced by calculating can’t be a calculated output. It is a slippery slope, as a calculable world that calculating might cause could be calculated, in other words virtual. The second option, that It comes from Bit, sounds good, but that matter causes information that causes matter is circular, and so as impossible as a perpetual motion machine. This reduces the above options to two: either physical reality exists by itself alone and just happen to be amazingly calculable, or it is actually calculated and so virtual. Matter is either a cause or it is caused, with no valid middle ground.
If our world is virtual, the physical events we see are just images generated by quantum waves. Reality is then all around us, but it isn’t what we see. We see objects that follow physical laws, but those laws come from quantum laws that aren’t physical. If we live in a world of dynamic waves not dead things, the universe isn’t just a machine winding down. But if the physical world is a virtual reality generated by processing, there must be:
A processor. A virtual reality must have a processor.
