Celular automata as a theory of everything.

[mardlamock]

Hello everyone, I just wanted to know what you guys thought about the idea that the universe is basically a cellular automata with simple rules that behaves in a deterministic fashion in a discrete time. I ve been looking a bit into the idea and it sounds quite amazing, stephen wolfram does an awesome job of explaining it in my opinion, but I wanted to know what you guys thought of it as it would reject both randomness and a continuous time.Thanks!

[mardlamock]

No one?

[astropapi1]

I've tried to get into this topic before, but it always ends up with me going like:

I think there have been some threads about this before. Glad somebody brought it up, though.

[Kerbart]

I think it aligns with the theory that our 10 dimensional universe is really just a holographic projection of a 2 (or maybe even one, I forgot the details) dimensional domain with suggestions that it's all just a simulation running inside a supercomputer. They had the math to prove it (the holographic projection part, not the simulation part of course) and given that the mantra in quantum mechanics seems to be "it doesn't matter how ##### crazy your idea is, if you can make the math work it's probably* true" well... that's obviously where you come into play.

*never entirely of course; Heisenberg took care of that

[Jesrad]

The universal cell automata theories of everything have been kinda popular in the 2000s, as a way to rejoin QED and relativistic gravity, by making inertia and gravity two aspects of the same (emergent) property of these cells.

There's the BEC theory, or Superfluid Vacuum Theory which I like: it states that the quantum vacuum is actually filled (in the Pauli Exclusion sense) by a Bose Einstein Condensate of particles at *negative* energy level, which we should really think of as the "real" zero energy level. And everything observable is just "froth" on top, that cannot go to a lower level because it's already full (exceptions are matter-antimatter annihilations). That fundamental BEC then is the substrate by which metrics express the universal constants, and through which EM propagates, very much like the good ol' Ether stuff from the past, but is also the cause of inertia and gravity by inducing resistance to acceleration proportional to mass. What's the relation with cellular automata ? Well all the calculations are made from basic Planck-scale "cells" of BEC. Fun stuff, recommended reading.

There's of course the Quantum Loop gravity theory which divides space into a Planck-scale lattice of little quantum cells.

There also are Zizzi&Paola's theory of the universe as a big quantum cellular automata which has funny religious implications, related works by Bisio&D'Ariano&Tosini, and a few more.

[rkman]

Layman's perspective:

Cellular automata ("game of life" etc) have the passing of time implemented not as a variable in the algorithm but as an inherent property of the algorithms, by virtue of the fact that cellular automata algorithms are iterative.

I think that's interesting because reality is iterative (one condition leading to the next, depending on the details of the initial condition).