Playing Dice With God!

Playing Dice With God!

Most of us would be familiar with the Matrix trilogy which brought us face to face with virtual reality. While watching the movie, often one doesn’t know whether Keanu Reeves is in “reality” or in the Matrix. The whole concept of “reality” is made to stand on its head so to say with what is firmly “known” to you as reality turns out to be just some computer simulation.  So once the movie ends, we heave a sigh of relief as the adrenalin level in our blood stream returns to normalcy, get back to the “reality” of the familiar world in which we have been living. But is the “reality” we perceive the “actual reality” ?

Stephen Hawking has conjectured that though our Universe has sprung into existence through a random event like the Big Bang, such an event may very well have occurred in someone’s basement lab. Those in our Universe that is creatures like ourselves, will have absolutely no way of knowing if that was the way our Universe has been created. Or is there?

There just may be a way to find get a glimpse of an answer to this but sure enough the answer could be beyond our wildest conjectures.  Dr Sylvester James Gates Jr, Professor at University of Maryland, in a lecture indicated that when the physicists were working on the supersymmetry of the String theory, they discovered that there was a computer code embedded in the equations, similar to what is found in search engines that run browsers. He has reiterated that what they have found did not just “look like a computer code” but was a computer code of a specific type, error correction code which ensures that the errors that could otherwise occur during transmission are automatically rectified. Theory for such codes was worked out in 1940s by Claude  Shannon who is widely acclaimed as the father of information technology. Prof George Smoot of University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist, cosmologist and winner of Nobel prize for Physics in 2006 and many other distinguished physicists have also reiterated the possibility that we may indeed be a computer simulation. Some believe that we are just holographic projections, 3D projections created by some 4D creatures. Reminds one of strong belief held in Vedic tradition that the whole world is a maaya that is just an illusion. The boundaries between physics and metaphysics seem to get more and more blurred every day.  

Very few people will have the wherewithal to confirm or negate the theories proposed by these worthy scientists, I am certainly not one of them, so I have provided the links on youtube and you should check these out yourself and form your own opinion.  

The implications are mind-boggling. We, meaning the entire Universe around us has been “created” by someone through a computer program??? Maybe some creature, in another  Universe, working in his laboratory, not unlike Large Hadron Collider at CERN, created this Universe of ours???? Let there be a Big Bang said this “God” and that was that??? However, once he is done with the creation part, this “God” would have no way to communicate with the Universe created by him, at least not by any means understood by us and certainly he would not have been able to create “man” in his image. I am assuming that “man” is a result of a long sequence of random events in the history of Universe spanning 13.7 billion years. I am sure no program could take care of all the eventualities to throw up homo sapiens on the third rock revolving  around a mid-sized star in one of the 100 billion galaxies in the Universe.

As Prof Alan Guth of MIT feels that maybe one day we will also be able to replicate such “experiment” to create a big bang on our own and part of energy poured into LHC will vanish without a trace, leaving us with another universe. And how much mass will be required to kick-start such a universe? Take a guess! Prof Guth feels one gram should be sufficient !!!!! Of course the conditions need to be right.

Such a universe would get pinched off from our universe at the moment of creation and we will have no more contact with it. Each universe will exist in a separate space-time. Maybe by that time CERN scientists would have figured a way to write error-correcting codes in the big-bang program so that a few billion years down the line, in the newly created universe, a set of scientists will start wondering if they were living in a computer simulation.   

Einstein could never come to terms with the probabilistic nature of quantum physics and firmly believed that God doesn’t play dice. Now that we know that God does indeed play dice, maybe we can join Him at the table one day!   

 

 LazyBee aka Shirish Potnis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zDz5BrngxQ Prof Sylvester James Gates,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chfoo9NBEow   Prof George Smoot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZtRfACbygY  Prof Alan Guth