Since this video is picking up a lot of traffic for some weird reason, I want to make it clear that this video is not meant to be taken seriously. It is not an accurate depiction of physics or simulation theory. I just thought it would be fun to point out a few similarities that pop up when you ignore important details.
All good. I bloody well HOPE people weren't interpreting this video as a completely accurate account of how the Universe, Nature, and Space all function. 🙂 Besides, in reality, digital values for nearly anything in the Universe are completely incorrect; only ANALOG, "infinite" values for everything are truly legitimate. But humans *cannot* possibly function in that type of environment. In other words... yes... exactly, Pi pretty much MUST be truncated. And no matter how many digits a person factors in, it's still "always wrong". 🙂 Always.
@@Novastar.SaberCombat You're touching on two big ideas-or questions related to the very nature of scientific knowledge, even if by accident. I'm replying so that you may ponder them. They're really, really deep, and are certainly worth thinking about. Generally, we build science from two major kinds of building blocks: theories and models. They aren't same, but tightly interwoven. Models allow you to do calculations and predictions. Theories are higher level frameworks that _carve objects out of reality,_ shake dry them thoroughly to get rid of inessential properties and describe how the object interact in a self-consistent way. For example, General Relativity is a theory. It is built on a few postulates, statements that are taken to always hold. The postulates may take a different form: if within the theory some statements A and B are equivalent (each implies the other), either can be taken as a postulate. Usually, GR is based on the principle of equivalence of inertial and gravitational masses (you can conduct no experiment inside a rocket that would tell you whether it's on a launchpad in the Earth's gravity, or are accelerating in a void with exactly the same acceleration g), and the principle of general covariance: all physics is valid in a small neighbourhood around you. I won't go deeper into the breakdown of the latter, just it's not as simple as it looks at the first sight. The theory then proceeds to _define objects,_ and they make sense only within the theory. For example, GR operates in _spacetime,_ a 4D (mathematical) space with certain axioms imposed on it. At every point of spacetime there exist certain mathematically involved, tensor _fields:_ the metric, the Einstein tensor field G, and the T, describing density of matter, energy-momentum, angular momentum and pressure. External forces may act on you, but notably absent is a force of gravity: the theory is built such that it's redundant. In this form, the main statement of the theory is written in an extremely simple form: G=kT, where k is the “constant of nature.” The left side describes the curved geometry of spacetime, and the right matter-energy content. The theory permits you to add another constant term Λ: G=kT+Λ, which, added on the right, says that spacetime possesses some kind of inherent energy density. You can build a model from the theory by solving this equation: some predict the existence of black holes, other gravitational waves, yet other give back the Newtonian model of gravity. Some solutions produce truly geometrically exotic spacetimes, which we often rush to dismiss as obviously not describing the Universe as we know it-Einstein himself dismissed the physical meaning of the first ever found solution, containing a non-rotating eternal black hole; he didn't live to the first observation of one. The theory withstood many-a-hundred if not thousands experimental tests, all showing not a hint of discrepancy. It's a wonderfully good theory. Newtonian gravity is an example of a model without a theory. Newton himself couldn't explain how bodies act one upon another through immense nothingness, and wrote in one letter, later in life, that, TL;DR, only an uneducated idiot would believe that such a thing is possible. It gives you a formula how to compute gravitational attraction without any explanation how gravity works. Next, think of the two big unknowns it cosmology: dark matter and dark energy. Both are perfectly compatible with GR: dark matter can be _modelled_ by treating it as a field of massive superfluid without viscosity or vorticity, and the dark energy is even simpler, it's the same constant Λ. The two big ideas are about the nature of our knowledge. _There is no objects in nature, they exist only in theories._ “digital values for nearly anything in the Universe” is undefined because of this pesky “everything”-no theory, no “thing.” Models without theories, called empirical, borrow their notion of “things” from other theories, like Newtonian gravity borrows “things” like forces and masses from Newtonian dynamics (F=ma has both, although the m refers to an _inertial_ mass of a body, not its _gravitational_ mass; why both appear to be the same number has been left without a theoretical explanation before Einstein's GR). You assign values only to the properties of these objects, and the objects don't even exist without a theory. That's the first one to think about, and deeply so. Is this strange mathematical object, curved 4-dimensional manifold of spacetime, really real? Different theories, different realities? No, obviously not. But how come we describe the nature with these invented things, and call them “discoveries?” We did not tear off a cover from the reality. We found a good way to describe it. Also, the models of dark matter as a superfluid field, and the dark energy as a constant are rather not satisfying. We can drop the question on the floor, as Newton was never able to describe non-locality of gravity, but we really want answers. What is this superfluid made of? What is this negative pressure form of energy? The first question feels more tangible: we know from experience what is “stuff,” we can touch stiff, see it, smell it, taste it. The second is more abstract: we don't encounter energy with our senses. That's two types of objects that are, in the end, are also theoretical. Matter is easier to imagine because it has everyday intuition of “stuff” we can sense directly. Energy is less so; we're just used to it. You can feel the warmth of a campfire and say that you _feel_ radiative heat energy. But there are so many forms of energy, and it only an example. And the thought that we describe reality mostly with invented objects, the rest with analogies to the little bit of the reality that's available to our senses is kinda unsettling. The second question is, can we capture a complete description of nature in theories? Every theory can be asked a “but why…” question that is external to it, that it can't answer. The constant k in Einstein's equation has a value. Why? It's a combination of Newton's gravity constant and the c, confusingly called the “speed of light in a vacuum,” but it's really just c, a constant of nature; “speed of light in a vacuum” is its physical interpretation-the speed of light _equals_ c, but _is not_ c. Why does it have the value it does? Suppose we discovered another theory which explained the _cause_ of it: c _must_ have this specific value because X. But then, we ask this new theory: why X? This chain of causation is infinite. It seems that you're right saying “it's still "always wrong". Always.” Maybe not wrong, but incomplete. Apparently, the answer is no, we cannot know it all, there is always a cause, and our best theories describe effects of these unknown causes… But wait, something is wrong! _We_ invent the theories and objects in theories, and then demand _causes_ for these abstraction! The question takes an unexpected angle here: is our logic right? Does the way we build our scientific knowledge makes sense at all? We know that it leads to the paradoxical infinite chain of “buy whys;” are we even doing it the right way? Nobody has come up with a better way, of course. but... Is a better, paradox-free learning possible, or is it a fundamental limitations on our mind? In the end, logic haven't grown on a tree; it has been constructed by generations of ancient philosophers, first put into a concise form by Aristotle, and developed further-by _us._ The demand for causes to effects is also rooted in our life experience, we haven't dug it out from the ground either. The idea of a “prime mover” as at the start of all causal chains, also invented by the same philosophers-again, _us, the thinking humans,_ and it's only an escape hatch from the paradox; you can place God, aliens, telepathic kittens or supercomputer superblokes who run the simulation into this ever vacant place, but none of these attempts would be experimentally testable. This is another open-ended big question. Have fun with them! 🙂
I mean if you want to be really technical about it, the statement doesn't make much sense on the surface. A tick rate should have units of 1/s where s denotes time but the speed of light has units m/s. So the speed of light, by itself, isn't really a tick rate. However, it turns out physicists are generally very lazy. For example, I can say that an electron has a mass of 0.511 MeV. MeV are not a unit of mass; they're a unit of energy. But there's an implied factor of 1/c^2 since we're talking about the mass of an electron. So you could argue that I implied a factor of 1/m when talking about how the speed of light is the universe's tick rate. I mean I didn't, but you could make that argument given the context of the video. But glad you liked the vid :)
@@kellymoses8566 I don't understand what point you're trying to make. I wasn't talking about the speed of information; I was talking about tick rates. Since the speed of light is not a tick rate, there are implied factors that make it a tick rate, similar to the example I provided in my other comment. Or for the case of the speed of light: A tick rate has the units: [1/s] Speed has units: [m/s] That means when I say the speed of light is a tick rate, I'm implying that I'm dividing by some length scale. For instance, if we were to divide by a Planck Length, we'd get units of [1/s] and we'd also get the reciprocal of Planck Time, which is commonly known as the smallest time scale where things make any sense (similar to a tick rate). Again, it's meant to be a sort of multi-layered joke. On the surface, from a layperson perspective, it sort of makes sense because the speed of light is a universal constant and is the "speed limit" of the universe. From your perspective, a relatively informed perspective, the statement doesn't make much sense for reasons previously discussed in the comment chain. And from the perspective of an overthinking physicist, it makes sense as a joke because of implied units. Again, I know this is a bad multi-layered joke but it's the kind of thing I like to sprinkle into my videos from time to time.
@@jasonmayo I guess you could think of the universe as being simulated on an extremely large network of parallel processors each in charge of simulating one region of the universe. To avoid having to network every simulator with every other simulator, the speed of light is there to limit the physics sim such that within the tick rate of the simulator, each only needs to receive information from the adjacent simulators. This allows an infinitely extensible infrastructure (just add more to the edges) without needing to scale the interconnects quadratically...
Please do a part 2 I loved this. As a computer science student its really interesting to see how we can explain the physical properties with programming logic.
Man you just made me question whether we're living in a simulation. Physics-wise it makes a lot of sense... (physics student here) God damn it. Or... Simulation Overlords damn it
I don't think these necessarily suggest we're living in "a simulation". But they do suggest to me that the fundamental structure of time and space might be discrete rather than continuous.
2:22 Important to note that an "observer" can be an inanimate object as well, this lack of precision only continues until precision is needed for things such as collisions.
The problem with that is time isn't invariant, so I could measure 1 Planck Time in the same "time frame" that you could measure 2 Planck Times. Or in other words, because of relativity, we can't really define our tick rate based on time since people in moving reference frames would experience different amounts of time dilation and "measure" different Planck Times. Or in other other words, it would be like measuring two simulation ticks for every simulation tick that passes. However; the speed of light is constant in all frames of reference (as far as we know), so it would make sense to base a tick rate off of that. Now it would've made sense to say that the tick rate was some arbitrary fraction of the speed of light but that's a level of pedantry that most people watching my videos don't really care about. However, you could technically define the tick as the number of "spacetime intervals" per second and use the corresponding Planck units (with some arbitrary scaling factor to avoid getting 0), but that would just simplify into an arbitrary fraction of the speed of light cubed (and Planck's constant and Newton's Gravitational constant).
@@jasonmayo The more accurate a joke gets, the funnier it gets - in my humble opinion. It was still a funny video though, because a lot of it was indeed spot on! :D You've got your units mixed up one way or another. Even if you can't use the Planck Time, you certainly can't use the speed of light, either. A tickrate is how often the game engine updates the state of the game based on commands it has received until then, and it also is the minimum amount of time anything can last. The only thing that fits this description is the Planck Time. In addition, the tickrate does not actually work with frames of reference anyway. It updates everything at the same moment - not relative to each other, but just the same moment. I'm not a physicist so this blows my mind. I am pretty sure that observers in different frames of reference will experience the Planck length at the same amount if time as it is frame invariant, just like a game world's tickrate. Indeed. it is defined from the Planck Length divided by the speed of light. But of course there's also space dilation... But now I'm getting interested. By the way, have you posted this on /r/outside? They'd definitely enjoy it.
@@IshayuG Ok yeah, that's my bad. For some reason, I forgot that Planck time is quite literally defined by the speed of light so it works. For some reason, my brain was processing it as if you were referring to the actual quantity (like just a number) and not the actual definition of length/c (I literally used the definition while writing my comment about spacetime intervals so I don't know why it didn't click then). I just realized because I was about to write something along the lines of: "Of course the speed of light is in the wrong units. That's why I mentioned it needs to be some arbitrary fraction." even though that's quite literally the definition of Planck time. Sorry it's really early for me. However, now that I recall, (this video is a bit old in my perspective) the reason I used the speed of light is because it's the "go to" constant. Like sure, Planck time is more suitable here but the importance lies in the fact that it's related to the speed of light. Also, it saved me time because the speed of light is more iconic and recognizable. So like, we had the same idea/viewpoint on "tickrates" but I was to stupid and sleepy to realize. tl;dr You're right, I wasn't paying enough attention. We should be on the same page now. Also, I found that my videos tend to do better when left on RU-vid. I'm a small channel right now so I think it's beneficial to let the algorithm figure out a suitable audience before promoting my videos elsewhere.
@@IshayuG Ok, I should clarify further. I know the statement "the speed of light is the universe's tick rate" or whatever I said is false. But I meant it as in the physics-y, "The proton's mass is 938 MeV". It's implied that the necessary units to make energy into mass are there but we're just too lazy to put them there. Likewise, although the speed of light isn't a tick rate, the speed of light divided by the speed of light squared multiplied with the appropriate length scale can be a tick rate. Sorry, just an afterthought.
this is probly the most interesting video I've seen in a while, more pls also; it is important to remember that in quantum physics observation is understood basically as any physical interaction, so I dunno how well Your metaphore would apply to it; but tbh schroedinger's cat thought experiment has the same problem by itself anyways lol
Thanks :) And I'm aware of quantum schenanhigans but it's much easier to say "look" rather than "make some physical measurement" because people noticing that "joke" are going to be either lay people, which know about quantum mechanics via something like Schrodinger's Cat, or people that already understand physics. Of course, this runs into the issue of spreading misinformation but it's unlikely anyone would take a video like this seriously in terms of education.
Surprised you didn't mention the Planck length and time as determining the frame rate and resolution of the universe. Or did you say that in so many words and I just didn't understand? Or am I getting this wrong?
Dude I was just talking about the same topic with my friend a little while ago. I don't really know this video is satire or not but I do believe the world is some what simulated right now. You got a new sub sir.
I wouldn't call it satire but I wouldn't call it serious either. I'm more or less just pointing out that some parts of physics somewhat resemble the way we design some parts of some games. At the end of the day, it's impossible to know if we're in a simulation because either we don't live in a simulated world, or we live in a simulation in which, the people running the simulation don't want us to know. Both of these are identical and indistinguishable from our perspective. Of course, there exists a case in which we do live in a simulation and they do want us to know, in which case, you could say we haven't looked hard enough yet. But current knowledge and evidence supports the latter.
They're not bugs. They're features. Also, gravity is really weak, so they probably have time to figure something out before we get precise enough instruments to do anything gamebreaking with gravity
Quantum mechanics still assumes continuous properties such as a smooth space-time, the wave function is continuous in space and time till it collapses Also, there are deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics such as Bohmian mechanics
All origins of the universe are unfathomable since it always returns to the question of 'where did that come from, then,' so I just stick with scientific explanation and don't sweat the possibilities, but in defense of simulation theory, NPC's don't pay for their simulation and are totally unaware of the transactions involving their world. There is no reason to assume the theoretical simulation host isn't making money. There are also people who just make games for fun; it's not like they're doing it for the characters they create within even if they do it for free.
Lag isn't all that inportant for those in a simulation, though. We would get slowed down same as everything else. Lag reduction would be for players outside the simulation. To put it another way, Mario doesn't know he slowed down when the system lags. Only the player notices.
Your server admins have been notified, please stop disturbing the NPCs or you'll be kicked out. Great work!! For the part 2, how about Wolfram's "A new kind of science"? Voxel graphs, Game of life, cfd meshing with density dependent on gradient.
I think they made a huge mistake by setting the coordinate precision so high, we wouldn't notice much change if the Planck length was a bit longer. Maybe they could've used the spare processing power to eliminate some glaring bugs.
Wave-particle duality is another example of a kludge. You want waves so you can form coherent images through lensing. You want particles so that light can interact with matter. But how does the probability wave function collapse instantaneously? Answer: It's not instantaneous, it's erased between frames so it only appears instantaneous to us. How does the probability wave function exist at all, given that it's neither matter nor energy? Answer: It's information stored in memory addresses, so it can be created and erased by the program during runtime at will.
Not really. Current knowledge about physics doesn't really support it and it'd only be possible to know if the ones running the simulation wanted us to know. So it's most likely very unknowable.
What if the simulation is for their benefit though? They could use as as a way to research medicines against whatever diseases they release to the world.
@@doughboywhine Depends on whether we consider them keeping the simulation running as payment. Is a hen I keep for its eggs doing unpaid labor for me, or does my feeding and sheltering it count as payment? I'm not asking this as a yes/no question, just something to think about philosophically.
A more horrifying question is: If we're being simulated because they're using a simulation to find an answer to a problem these theoretical humans (or other higher beings) have, what will happen when they solve the problem that led to us being simulated in the first place?
I am in no way trying to advocate in support of the simulation hypothesis, but to assume that the being(s) in charge of the simulation would be humans makes very little sense. Humans exist in this hypothetical as an emergent phenomenon resulting from the flaws in the simulation. If anything, we would be to these potential beings what a glider in Conway's Game of Life is to us: A fascinating but ultimately insignificant pattern resulting from an arbitrary set of rules they created.
not even a 5% of this is even true, rendering it completely worthless sooo... I can't see myself getting absolutely anything from it, if you even had a point to begin with
Did you think this video was serious? It wasn't meant to be true... It was meant to point out "coincidences" between the way our computers work and how we've observed physics so far Like how I can say the ocean and my chair are the same color, so they must be made of the same material. It's a false statement that's only linked by a surface level coincidence.
@@jasonmayo computers exist, they exist, here, in this reality, in this universe, with its physics, the computers are made out of the universe's physics, they literally are made with it, work with it, the computers are part of the physics of the universe, they cannot by mere definition work differently than the universe's physics that they reside in, unless you manage to make or use a computer outside of this universe I don't see why it is relevant to point out that everything in this universe looks like the universe it is in. so I was right, you didn't have a point to being with
I never said I wanted to make that point. This video was never meant to be serious. Read the first 2 sentences again please. The point of the video was to be stupid. I even gave an example.
@@jasonmayo ahhgg... alright whatever... maybe you are right and didn't plan to make the video serious... so I'm sorry alright, lately I'm watching physics videos on youtube and... you know... maybe I shouldn't, I only angry myself, is just that, I like the topic and I try to watch them and I hate them and youtube recomends me more and I watch them because I want good content and I don't have anything, I'm just ranting, I'm sorry alright, I will try to stop watching physics videos
I'm sorry too. With the style this video was made in, it wasn't clear that I wasn't being serious. Also, RU-vid recommends physics videos because you keep watching them, so just stop watching them if they bother you XD
But why asume the simulation would be run by humans? And if they are humans, why asume they aren’t motivated by greed? The computing capacity and intellectual “power”(?) needed to perform such simulation would mean the beings controlling it are practically gods to us. How would we understand their motives.
![Physics is like a Poorly Coded Simulation [Figuratively]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
