Rudy’s Blog

What a week, two covers! I saw a draft version of the cover for my collection Mad Professor coming out from Thunder's Mouth Press in January, 2007. (I'll check with Thunder's Mouth before posting it here; meanwhile here's a Goldsworthy-like rock construction I saw by Big Sur River.)

By the way, the cover draft was by no less a figure than the estimable and inimitable Georgia Rucker!

Here's the table of contents.

I think only one of these stories is currently on line, this would be “Jenna and Me”, which commits the CrimeThink of satirizing the First Family as of 2003 or so.

Today I got my first look at the nice cover for my novel Mathematicians in Love, coming out in December from Tor Books. See my page for the book for more info, including my extensive writing notes.

A good interview with Seth Lloyd about his new book Programming the Universe is on the online zine Edge followed by some of my comments taken from earlier remarks on Lloyd on my blog.

Jose Garcia interviewed me on his Meme Therapy blog. Good interview, thanks Jose.

Poking around online I found a supercomputer animation of merging black holes . I watched it while iPod-listening to “The Torture Never Stops” on Zappa’s “You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore, Vol 1.” Zappa’s way ahead of the supercomputer. Speaking of Zappa, there’s a Zappa family concert at the Warfield in SF on June 24, and Ticketmaster is sold out for it and I am so bummed.

There’s been some news this week about braneworld black holes. Now, Hawking used to claim that small black holes would quickly evaporate, but, hey, physics is just science fiction without the colors, and the gang’s sick of that old Hawking line. This comes out of Lisa Randall’s work. So I’m thinking I really should try and use Randall’s ideas in Postsingular, if her stuff is so hot.

According to Randall, we live on the Weakbrane and the Gravitybrane is about 37 Planck lengths away from us in the fifth dimension, a Planck length being 1.6 * 10^(-35) meters. So that’s a net distance of about 60 * 10^(-35) meters, or 0.6 * 10^(-33) meters. 10^(-33) has the nice name “decillionth”.

There’s no accepted scientific prefix for a decillionth. The standard ones poop out with zepto for sextillionth and yocto for septillionth. I think the idea is to run backwards through the alphabet from there on, so the upcoming prefixes should start with, respectively, x, w, v, and u. How about “xoxxo,” “weeble,” “vato,” and “unda”? That means decillionth (10^(-33)) would be at the v, for vato, and unodecillionth (10^(-36) would start with u, for unda. So the Planck length can be called either .016 vatometers or 160 undameters. Harking back to the previous paragraph, 37 times that gives an interbrane distance of .6 vatometers or, if you prefer, 600 undameters.

The fifth dimension is what mathematicians used to call the fourth dimension, but the time axis lobby has put in a power play to lock in exclusive naming rights to “fourth dimension,” leaving “fifth dimension” for the first available extra dimension of space.

According to Randall there’s an exponentially derived warp factor between the two branes of 10^16, which can also be written as e^(2.3*16) or e^37, (where “e” is a ubiquitous little number beloved of mathematicians; it’s about 2.7 in size, and as it happens, e^2.3 is 10). That 37 I mentined is the interbrane distance in Planck lengths, not a coincidence. If your interbrane distance in Planck lengths is K, then your warp factor is e^(K) or e^(-K), depending which way you’re moving.

Nice buzz-word: the warping works because the whole higher-dimensional space is an “anti de Sitter” space.

Some physicists eschew proper mathematical diction, and refer to 10^16 as ten million billion, by the way, which sounds, to my ear at least, barbaric compared to the proper and much nicer equivalent expression ten quadrillion.

So, okay, the Gravitybrane is thirty-seven Planck lengths away, which is just over half a decillionth of a meter (.6 vatometers to be precse), and there’s a warp factor of ten quadrillion between the two branes. Why is the warp needed? What does the warp entail?

Gravity is much stronger on the Gravitybrane. One way to explain this is to think of gravity as mediated by graviton particles and to suppose that they are much sparser over on our Weakbrane because the Weakbrane is stretched out ten quadrillion-fold. The warp means, in other words that, the Weakbrane is ten quadrillion times bigger, and from this it follows, according to Randall, that objects are ten quadrillion times less massive in our home brane, also time runs ten quadrillion times as slowly as over there in the metropolitan Gravitybrane.

For the purposes of my story in Postsingular I’m working with a so-called Mirrorbrane. I’d been hoping to identify the Mirrorbrane with the Gravitybrane, but this isn’t going to work out. I want the Mirrorbrane to be quite similar to ours, only the people from the other brane look like insubstantial aethereal ghosts when they visit us. And I want us to be dense gnomes like hobbits when we go over there, we can kick our way through walls. I want the Mirrorbraners to have been coming here for years and we didn’t notice them, or rather, thought they were spirits or ghosts. Big aethereal ghosts from the Mirrorbrane. And I wanted the warp factor to just be six, not ten quadrillion. They’re about 30 or 40 feet tall when they visit us, we’re about a foot tall when we visit them.

I’d been counting on Randall’s braneworld theories to do all this for me, but today, incited by the renewed public interest in her work, I reread the relevant parts of her book Warped Passages, and I’m seeing major problems.

Problem 1. Her warp factor is ten quadrillion when I want a warp factor of six.

Possible solution 1: I can get warp six if I say the distance between branes is the logarithm base e of 6, which is around 1.8 Planck lengths instead of 37 of them, making an interbrane distance of 0.018 vatometers or 180 undameters. But then maybe the setup isn’t very physically meaningful. Randall picked her particular warp so as to solve the question of why gravity is so weak. But I could live with this solution. Maybe there’s several extra branes, and the Mirrorbrane isn’t the same as the Gravitybrane.

Problem 2. I think I’ve had the warping backwards in my head for the last six months. That is, rereading Warped Passages I now see that if we’re the Weakbrane, and the other guys are the Gravitybrane, and if I could somehow shadowcast a person from one brane to another without resizing them, then the Gravitybraners would look small in our world, and we’d look big in the Gravitybrane, which is the opposite of what I wanted.

Solution 2: The Mirrorbrane is a lower down Weakerbrane that none of the physicists have even thought about yet, and that’s where my aliens come from, so they are indeed big and ghostly. In other words, push the Mirrorbrane over to the “other direction” from the Gravitybrane, so the scaling goes the way I want.

Problem 3: If you were somehow able to travel from Weakbrane to Gravitybrane, Randall suggests the trip would be via a smooth series of transisitions. And when you arrived, things would look pretty much the same, which would be science-fictionally disappointing. She says, in other words, that when going to for instance the Gravitybrane, I’d shrink, and speed up, and get heavy in such a way that when I arrived there in “Branesville,” I’d be like them.

Solution 3: I’ll just ignore the smooth transition and assume that somehow when you jump over to the other brane you bring your old size with you. You still feel the same and the other world looks weird. And I think I’ll leave out the time scaling, as that would make it too complicated for the readers.

I was worried I’d have to just bail on Randallizing my branes. I can’t get so far into chasing the headlines for the novel that I lose what works for Postsingular in terms of being objective correlates for the psychic states I’m depicting. The Mirrorbraners are like ghosts, and when we go to their world we’re like gnomes, like hobbits — and that’s final.

But, hmm, I can still have that if I have the Mirrorbrane be about 1.8 Planck lengths below us, inisit that interbrane hoppers bring their size with them. And, pace Randall, we can still have a Gravitybrane some 37 Planck lengths above us. Mirrorbrane is like heaven, with ghostly angels; Gravitybrane is like hell, with truly tiny femtometer daemons.

Today’s physicists simply haven’t happened to notice the Mirrorbrane yet. Size, mass, but maybe not time are all scaled by a factor of 6 between our brane and the Mirrorbrane that my characters visit in Postsingular. And maybe the femtometer Gravitybrane guys show up later on.

Actually to make the visiting Mirrorbraners really aehtereal, I'll tack on another kludge and claim their quantum states are nearly 90 degrees out of phase with ours. But it's not reciprocal, when we go ovet there, we're solid. Whatever it takes to make the story work!

Further consideration for possible use in a future story. Suppose that I were more properly to assume I do rescale in a natural fashion as I move from brane to brane. How would the other brane look then.

Note that the branes wouldn’t be exactly the same to live in because after all, over in Gravitybrane, the force of gravity is comparable in strength to electricity, to magnetism, to the strong that binds quarks and gluons into protons and neutrons, and to the weak force that does whatever when some particles decay. Instead of being, like a quadrillion times weaker the way it is over here in the Weakbrane.

I am trying to visualize the effects of the differences, so if you have some ideas here, help me out.

At the very least, it seems like dropping something on the floor in Gravitybrane would create a strong enough force to overcome the electrical bonds that hold molecules together and smash just about anything; coins would shatter, not just dishes. Even more, it seems like the elementary particles in a dropped object might get broken up. Like you drop an apple and when it hits the ground it’s like you blasted it with the large hadron supercollider atom smasher and you get this deadly flux of muons and hard gamma rays coming off the floor atcha!

A more pleasant effect of gravity being as strong as magnetism is that you can stick anything to a refrigerator even if it doesn’t have a refrigerator magnet attached. Everybody’s clustered together like Velcro grapes.

A less pleasant effect would seem to be that the pull of Earth on my bod would crush me into an amoeba, like those critters Robert Forward wrote about in his novel Dragon’s Egg.

Coudl yo udo anything interesting with a world where gravity is as strong as the other forces, that is, about ten quadrillion times as powerful? If I understand Randall's talk of Branesville, she seems to suggest that if you made things much smaller then the gravity wouldn't have to crush everything.

I spend two nights camping in Big Sur! Even did some laptop wireless in the lawn behind the River Inn. Jack Kerouac never had it this good.

Camped at the walk-in Andrew Molera campground, walked on the beach there, also went back to Pfeiffer Beach just like last year. I made a fire from some wood lying near the river, left over from the spring floods.

Went to campsite 8, where I was last year, under the big sycamore. I was alone, a bit lonely, but that's life at my age, isn't it. One's friends are fewer and less agile. It's so great to look up and see a tree! In color. All night it was shades of gray, but with stars hung in it like Xmaslites.

Two teenage California girls slept in a dome tent near mine, I fell asleep to the faint sound of their voices chattering. I heard: “I'm all, 'I hate you.'” “And I go, 'Are you serious?'” “It was sooo good.” “And I'm like, 'What about love?'” A gentle babbling brook, our beloved native patois. I'm glad to be a Californian.

Sunny, though the continual west wind on the beach was in the 40 to 50 mph range. That's a problem. Best to walk southeast on the beach and go up on the bluffs to walk northwest. Here's a “Rocking Stick” movie I made last year of the wind.

I was able to photograph a UFO! I think I can use a UFO in Postsingular. Alerted by the Trinity test, it showed up at Hiroshima and ate the explosion.

I’m revising a set of ideas for the final Chaps 4 & 5 of Postsingular; have been doing this once or twice a day for over a week. Maybe twenty revs in all. Like a sliding blocks puzzle, so many constraints, and every fix puts in new problems. When I came into this phase, I hadn’t realized how hard it was gonna be to wire up all the constraints and making everything meet at the vanishing point.

When I’m unsure it’s easy for me to diddle around with physics and math notions. The harder thing — and what I need perhaps more —is ideas about the characters’ relations with each other, the double crosses, the alliances, the connections.

[Peaceful cove.]

The following is an idea I’m not gonna use called “log log scale” for short.

This idea is actually too unhip to use, as the physics hepcats like Lisa Randall, of “Braneworld” fame, are these days saying that in fact the distance to the next brane is only a few hundred Planck lengths, which is about a decillionth of a meter.

[BEGIN LOG LOG RAP]

There are many alternate versions of our brane or universe. They are separated by eight-dimensional space. Arranged along this single axis, a 1D continuum of possible worlds.

Suppose the unrolled eighth dimension stretches out way past the parallel brane. Punctures it and keeps going. So then the precise eight-dimensional distance of the parallel brane is an interesting piece of information.

[I made a "Talking Branches" movie of these branches kind of talking to each other.]

In order to jump to the Mirrorbrane you need to know the precise value of the distance K to that world, it acts as a jump-code. And I want the jump code to be a million digits long, so that it’s a big deal for Chu to remember it.

[This is that same Pfeiffer Beach gate that Bela Kis surfs through in Mathematicians in Love to get to La Hampa. Click here to see the "La Hampa Gate" movie I made last year.]

I also want the scaling factor S between the our brane and the Mirrorbrane to be the comfortable-to-visualize number 6.

And now I relate K to S.

The branes can be quite distant from each other in the eighth dimension. When you hop to a different brane, you experience a scaling effect by a factor of S. The value of S when going from one brane to another is coupled to the value of the interbrane distance K along the eighth dimension, as measured in meters (or, if you prefer, in Planck lengths). We view K as having a sign, so as to distinguish between the two directions that can be taken along the eighth dimensional axis. The law connecting S and K is:

S = alpha * log ( log (K) )

[I climbed this cool hill above Pfeiffer Beach; this is my fave pic of this outing. Monterey pines have these knobby little cones.]

The alpha is just an unimportant conversion factor with a magnitude on the order of 1; it corrects for whatever measuring unit you happen to use. The real action is in the log log operation. What this does is to go up two levels in the exponent stack and return the exponent that lives there.

[Dig this naturally occuring cellualar automaton.]

Thus if K is googol = 10^100 = 10^(10^2), then S ~ 2.

If K is googolplex = 10^googol = 10^10^100, then S ~ 100.

Suppose K is a number so big that it’s a million digits long, that is, K is 10^million = 10^(10^6). Then S ~ 6.

[A yucca cactus; you see lots of these higher up on the slopes above Sur. This year I didn't feel like much upward hiking, I'm still slightly weakend by that month-long flu. I didn't used to stay sick so long. Have I gotten weaker, or are the viruses stronger?]

Note that the distance K to a universe very similar to ours is exceedingly large, as it’s most unusual for two branes to closely match. In fact I suppose the distance between Mainbrane and Mirrorbrane to be on the order of millionplex or 10^million.

[END OF LOG LOG RAP]

Still more pictures! This one above harks back to a vision I had when I stopped believing everything is a computation and I was standing in the Big Sur River tired of working on my Lifebox tome, and I was like, “This isn’t computation, this is water.” I mentioned that last year already. Took the picture again anyway.

The stairway to heaven, yes. When I was there last year I made a 25 Meg “Singing To Eddy” movie of myself singing to the eddie, and I was looking for the “same” eddy, but didn't find it, but here's 's another movie from last year of the eddie, relating it to the whole world, it's an unconscionable 33 Meg. the “Universally Computing Eddy” movie. As with all of these, the sound is a bit blown out, and you have to let it run jerkily once and only then can you click and play it at normal speed. Yes, I'm a geek, but I'm a happy one.

I love these sweet little country roads.

You have to wade the knee-deep river to get to this nice meadow called the Dairy meadow. It’s like a museum of gnarly trees.

When I saw this I was so grateful to be alive. Here's a “Surf and Mountain” movie showing how the surf and the mountains fit together.

Vlog it, brah.

My demonic computer hacker pal John Walker has made a one-year-long movie of the view out one of his windows in Lignieres, Switzerland, shooting a picture a day and assembling them into a film called Les Quatre Saisons.

[Photos from the Pride Parade in Santa Cruz on Sunday.]

I’ve been working on ideas for the final chapters of my novel Postsingular. I have an issue with there being two parallel worlds (the Mainbrane and the Mirrrobrane), and I want them similar but not too similar.

One way to have the worlds be similar yet different might be that their histories diverged at a specific time. I’d pick 1946 (my birth year) or soon thereafter. After the first atomic bombs went off, a UFO showed up on Earth in the Mirrorbrane, it was a survey drone drawn by the blasts, and it released something that upset the symmetry between the Mainbrane and the Mirrorbrane, at least in the region of Earth. Power chord!

The UFO put a lazy eight patch into the computation that generates Earth on the Mirrorbrane, but not onto the computation that generates Earth in the Mainbrane. Why the one and not the other? Maybe the UFO just happened to be from a Mirrorbrane world. Maybe there are more lazy eight worlds in the Mirrorbrane and we’re one of the earlier ones in the Mainbrane.

The eighth dimension, which has a very small Planck-length-like extension in the Mainbrane, becomes stretched to infinite length in the Mirrorbrane, although the infinite length is metricized so as to be finite. (Ph. D. = Piled High and Deep, .)

I will use the phrase “lazy eight” to speak of this change. It combines: eighth dimension, infinity as ∞, and the fact that infinity is “right here” in the eighth dimension as an ubiquitous lazy-man’s enlightenment.

It’s like you took the vanishing point of a painting and made it be at every point in space. The point at infinity, is present everywhere. The accessible point at infinity acts as an entanglement channel that connects every point with every other point in synchronicity.

How does lazy eight come to the Mirrorbrane?

Let’s just look at the historical record.

1945 A-Bomb. On July 16, 1945, in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first nuclear test took place, code-named “Trinity,”

1946 UFOs. In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece. The post World War II UFO phase in the United States began with a reported sighting by American businessman Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947.

1946 Gnarly SF. Rudy is born.

1947 Transistor. On 22 December, 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain succeeded in building the first practical point-contact transistor at Bell Labs.

1947 LSD. Sandoz Laboratories begins marketing LSD (discovered in 1938 by Albert Hoffman) under the trade name “Delysid” as a psychiatric cure-all.

1949 Computer. The Baby Manchester programmable electronic computer.

1954 Turing’s death. Alan Mathison Turing (June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954) dies of cyanide poisoning. What if he instead invented psychic powers and teleported himself to San Francisco? [Thanks to Peter Norvig for suggesting the idea of an alternate history where Turing lives happily on SF, which has been gay friendly since post-WWII.]

It all fits!

I think I’m gonna use Turing and not the UFO. The British SS is closing in on Alan, trying to shove that poison apple in his mouth, and his morphogenesis work pays off with the ability to do lazy eight in his head! Solves the Halting Problem?

I wonder if I can work this Aztec marcher in too…

Even though I’ve been sober for ten years now, I still look up to my early hero Jack Kerouac. I love his open writing style, and I’m fully taken in by the way he transreally merged his fiction with his mythos. I choose not to live like him so I can be sixty and relatively serene and still out there hitting the word-surf, but even so I’ll forever view Jack’s ways as romantic and cool, even though I well understand the nastiness of the actual reality details, it’s like this high-school crush I’ll always remember fondly, my introduction to divine poesy, a memory of an enchanting but lethal land. I'm grateful for every fresh day I spend outside of that land. But I still think Jack, who's buried there, is a great writer and a hero to admire. Does that even make sense? Well, who says people have to make sense…

Sylvia and I were in San Francisco for the day, and I took a nap in Washington Square Park as I like to do, my way of merging with Jack, also I love napping in city parks, it's a deeper form of tourism, you're touring the astral plane of the area.

The connection here is a scene in Big Sur when Jack Kerouac napped there in 1960, aged 38, on his way to drinking himself to death. I used Amazon’s “Search In Book” feature to find the page of the novel (search for “161″) and then worked out where that is in my printed copy; it’s in Chapter 30. Here’s a long quote from that.

[Begin Big Sur quote.]

So Ben Fagan [poet Philip Whalen] now sees I’m going overboard crazy and I need sleep — “We’ll get a bottle!” I yell. But end up, he’s sitting in the grass of the park smoking his pipe, from noon to 6 P.M., and I’m passed out exhausted sleeping in the grass, bottle unopened, only to wake up once in a while wondering where I am and by God I’m in Heaven with Ben Fagan watching over men and me. And I say to Ben when I wake up in the gathering 6 P.M. dusk, “Ah Ben I’m sorry I ruined our day by sleeping like this” but he says: “You needed the sleep, I told ya”—“and you mean to tell me you been sitting all afternoon like that?”—“Watching unexpected events” says he …

”What happened while I was asleep?”—“Oh, people went by and came back and forth and the sun sank and finally sank down and’s gone now almost as you can see, what you want, just name it you got it”—“Well I want sweet salvation”—“What’s sposed to be sweet about salvation? maybe it’s sour” …

I feel good because I’ve had my sleep but mainly I feel good because somehow old Ben (my age) has blessed me by sitting over my sleep all day and now with these few silly words … It’s been the only peaceful day I’ve had in California, in fact, except alone in the woods, which I tell him and says, “Well, who said you werent alone now?” making me realize the ghostliness of existence tho I feel his big bulging body with my hands and say: “You sure some pathetic ghost with all that ephemeral heavy crock a flesh”—“I didn’t say nottin” he laughs … “What are we gonna do with our lives?”—“Oh,” he says,” I dunno, just watch em I guess”

[End Big Sur quote.]

As a bonus I found something amazing in Chapter 13 (search for “flying saucer”) of Big Sur. Here’s the quote:

“But on the way to Cody’s [Neal Cassady’s house] my madness already began to manifest itself in a stranger way…: I thought I saw a flying saucer in the sky over Los Gatos — From five miles away — I look and I see this thing flying along and mention it to Dave…”

Jack saw a flying saucer over my home town of Los Gatos! How perfect.

Here’s my review of Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos (Knopf, 2006). In most of this review I'll be grappling with certain debatable issues, but let me say out front that I really liked this book. It's amazingly readable, given the heavy subject matter. Lloyd has a light, deft touch, and he tells good jokes in passing. One has a sense of a lively, humane intelligence working throughout. Highly recommended.

Seth Lloyd is a 46 year old professor at MIT, specializing in quantum computation and quantum information theory. He’s best-known to the public for two articles in the Scientific American about quantum computing, most recently, “Black Hole Computers” in November 2004, co-written with Y. J. Ng. See also his more technical “Computational Capacity of the Universe,” online. More links: Kevin Kelly interviews Lloyd in the March, 2006, Wired; and a review of Lloyd's book in the New York Times.

He starts the new book, Programming the Universe, like this: “The universe is a quantum computer. … What does the universe compute? It computes itself.” [p. 3]

Rather than thinking in terms of matter holding information in terms of impossible-to-precisely-measure analog numbers like position or velocity, Lloyd suggests we think in terms of crisp quantum values that atoms can have; like “spin up vs. spin down” or “ground state vs. excited to discrete level so-and-so.” In this view, each particle in a physical system codes a few bits, and when the particles interact, we get a logical operation between the bits. Whenever particles bump each other, its in effect a quantum logic gate.

He has some good material about superposed states; the weird thing about quantum information is that a quantum bit or qubit can be in a superposed stated of partly 0 and partly 1.

Lloyd keeps his eye on the universe though. He suggests there is only one possible state for the start of the universe; it starts out with no bits of info at all. And the universe computes itself from there. Why, he wants to know, is the universe relatively complex looking without being boringly orderly (too cold) or totally random (too hot)?

Lloyd draws on the analogy of monkeys who are pounding away not on typewriters, but on keyboards that input code to a computer. The laws of nature are the computer. And the monkeys are inputting possible programs. Now, as it happens, lots of short programs generate nice-looking complex patterns. These are what Wolfram calls the Class 4 computations; the ones that I call gnarly computations. Water, fire, clouds, trees, these are all examples of natural computations that, given any of a wide range of inputs, will generate much the same kinds of patterns.

In Lloyd’s words, “Many beautiful and intricate mathematical patterns — regular geometric shapes, fractal patterns, the laws of quantum mechanics, elementary particles, the laws of chemistry — can be produced by short computer programs. Believe it or not a [programming] monkey has a good shot at producing everything we see.” [p. 184]

Lloyd has a nice description of Chaitin’s algorithmic complexity and Bennett’s logical depth, something I wrote about myself in Mind Tools. Bennett is amazing, he’s come up with so many important ideas, and Chaitin’s no slouch either. Lloyd uses Charles Bennett’s term “algorithmically probable” to refer to patterns that have a short program, and thus a high likelihood of resulting from randomly picked little programs.

He then says, “For the computational explanation of complexity to work, two ingredients are necessary: (a) a computer, and (b) monkeys. The laws of quantum mechanics themselves provide our computer.” [p. 185]

Actually, as I have doubts about quantum mechanics, I’d say that maybe we can just say the “laws of logic,” rather than “laws of quantum mechanics.”

The really debatable issue is what the monkeys are.

Stephen Wolfram would argue that the universe is ultimately deterministic; think of his beloved cone-shell type cellular automaton rule 30, which starts with a single bit, and spews out endlessly many rows of random-looking scuzz. So the random-looking seeds that feed into the universe’s computation aren’t in fact really random, they’re pseudorandom sequences generated by a lower level randomizing computation. In this view, there is only one possible universe.

I want to say, “Mektoub. It is written,” but that’s not quite accurate, as that phrase suggests that some divinity wrote out the history of the universe before it happened. It’s more that “It is programmed.” The underlying pseudorandomizer is a deterministic rule like CA Rule 30, and it feeds inputs into the universal computer that then generates the complex lovely patterns of the world.

Now, Lloyd, being a quantum mechanic, prefers to say that the “monkeys” are quantum fluctuations. One of the problems in this view is that it we aren’t philosophically satisfied with the notion of completely random physical events. We like to see a reason. The way quantum mechanics gets out of this is to say that since there’s no reason for a particular turn of events, it must be that all possible turns of events happen.

This is the multiversal view. Since there’s no reason that, say, bit 0 rather than bit 1 should pop up as the fluctuation found at a given instant, Lloyd would suppose that there are two universes, with 0 on the one hand and 1 on the other hand. Unlike David Deutsch, however, Lloyd isn’t interested in pushing the alternate universes as being truly real.

Lloyd sidesteps a move that I find intellectually unsatisfying. That is, he avoids falling back on the anthropic principle. If you suppose that all possible universe exist, then the question arises: why do we happen to be in a universe where everything is just right for humans to have come into existence? The anthropic principle says, well, the world is the way it is because if it weren’t, then we wouldn’t be here.

Lloyd seems to say, rather, that planets and trees and people are algorithmically probable. Things like us are fairly likely to occur in any gnarly class four computation, and all the universes, being universal computations, are potentially gnarly, and in fact a large number of random seed will produce gnarly.

But, being a quantum mechanic, Lloyd doesn’t give enough consideration to the ability of deterministic computations to generate what Wolfram calls “intrinsic randomness,” indeed, on p. 50 he writes, “Without the laws of quantum mechanics, the universe would still be featureless and bare.” That’s not true. If you look, for instance, at any computer simulation of a physical system, you see gnarly, but these simulations don’t in fact use quantum mechanics as a randomizer. They simply use deterministic pseudorandomizers to get their “monkey” variations to feed into the simulated physics. We really don’t need true randomness. Pseudorandomness, that is, unpredictable computation, is enough. There’s no absolute necessity to rush headlong into quantum mechanics.

Still on the debate between classical and quantum realities, Lloyd argues that the physical world can’t be well-simulated on digital classical computers because if you take a quantum system, then the system’s variables are generally in superposed states, so that if you have a system of, say, 300 atoms, and each atom’s spin is a qubit (quantum bit) that’s a superposed mixture of up and down, then to properly simulate what happens digitally, you really need to simulate all possible 2^300 pure states that the system could be in, and this is an impractically large number.

Therefore, says Lloyd, digital classical computers can’t simulate physics.

We could of course turn the argument around and say that if we believe that the universe results from a digital classical computation, then it must be that quantum mechanics is mistaken in thinking that systems really are in superposed states, for otherwise there would be too much work for the real ongoing digital classical cosmic computation which we can “plainly see” is happening all around us without slowing down.

In other words, I feel that Lloyd points out an inconsistency between the two beliefs, but he hasn’t proved that his version is correct.

This said, it’s nice to read about how nicely quantum computers can simulate physical systems. And I’m tempted to lighten up and let the quantum in to my heart. I’ll be doing that provisionally in any case in Postsingular which uses quantum computers. There’s no market in being a reactionary sorehead after all.

Coming back to Lloyd’s main point, the idea is “In the computational universe … the innate information-processing power of the universe systematically gives rise to all possible types of order, simple and complex.” Here, again, I’d stress that there’s no need for quantum computation per se to reach this conclusion. Because the laws of nature are a class 4 or gnarly computation they necessarily generate interesting structures that lie at the interface between on the one hand the Charybdis of predictable repetition and, on the other hand, the Scylla of random uninteresting scuzz.

By the way, I seem to recall that Charybdis was the sullen ocean-swallowing personification of a whirlpool near the Straits of Gibraltar and Scylla was the many-headed snapping personification of a shoal of sharp rocks near the whirlpool.

Charybdis, in that she pulls her inputs always to a single drowned point at the center of a vortex, is a good image of “too cold” computations that squeeze you down to constancy or periodicity. Scylla, in her savage punching-holes-in-the-hull aspect, is a good image of a “too hot” computation that tears everything to shreds.

Lloyd suggests what looks like a promising method for deriving general relativity from a quantum computational view of the reality. But perhaps its not so different form Wolfram’s more classical notion of reality as a network rewriting system that produces curved space itself.

[On p. 202, he makes a nice point, that is, since catalytic chemical reactions can carry out COPY, NOT and AND operations, we know that chemistry is computation universal. I wish I’d thought of saying that in my Lifebox tome!]

Bottom line: the universe computes itself, and there’s nothing particularly surprising about the level of complexity that we find around us, as this is typical for computations.

I’m science-fictionally intrigued with the idea of the big computation making up a kind of mind, and Lloyd also speaks to this: “Some of that information processing, like digital computation can resemble thought. But the vast majority of the information processing in the universe lies in the collision of atoms, in the slight motions of matter and light. Compared with what is normally called thought, such universal ‘thoughts’ are humble: they consist of elementary particles just minding their own business.” [p. 211]

But in Postsingular I’m gonna find a way to wake objects up…