"The more I learned about later on, as a physicist, the more struck I was that, when you get deep down into how nature works, down into looking at all of you as a bunch of quarks and electrons if you look at how these quarks move around, the rules are entirely mathematical, as far as we can say," Tegmark said. Tegmark's recent book, "Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality" (Deckle Edge, 2014), focuses on why the universe seems so closely tied to math. Cosmic rays would appear subtly different if space-time were formed of tiny, discrete chunks - like those computer pixels - as opposed to continuous, intact swaths, she said.įor the universe to be simulated in this way, it would have to be computed - meaning it would essentially be mathematical. īut other panelists said that, if the simulated universe has similar physical limitations to our perceived real universe - in which something infinitely complicated cannot be modeled without infinite resources - signs of shortcuts and approximations may lurk in our own world, the way an image breaks up into its constituent pixels when you get close enough to a screen.ĭavoudi proposed a possible way to spot one of these shortcuts: by studying cosmic rays, the most energetic particles scientists have ever observed. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum's Hayden Planetarium and host of this year's event, invited five intellectuals to the stage to share their unique perspectives on the problem: Zohreh Davoudi, a nuclear physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT whose recent book probes the universe as mathematics James Gates, a physicist at the University of Maryland who discovered strange, error-correcting codes deep in the equations of supersymmetry Lisa Randall, a physicist at Harvard University who thinks the simulation question is more or less irrelevant and David Chalmers, a philosopher at New York University who regularly questions the reality that conscious minds perceive. The event honors Asimov, the visionary science-fiction writer, by inviting experts in diverse fields to discuss pressing questions on the scientific frontiers. These were the big questions that a group of scientists, as well as one philosopher, tackled on April 5 during the 17th annual Isaac Asimov Debate here at the American Museum of Natural History.
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