viernes, julio 23, 2004

Científicos: sí, vivimos en Matrix

Paul Davies, destacado físico australiano, cuenta en el Sydney Morning Herald como la ciencia de vanguardia está probando lo que vimos en Matrix: vivimos en una simulación.
 
"We may be a simulation ... creations of some supreme, or super-being," muses Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, a staunch advocate of the multiverse theory. He wonders whether the entire physical universe might be an exercise in virtual reality, so that "we're in the matrix rather than the physics itself".
Is there any justification for believing this wacky idea? You bet, says Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, who even has a website devoted to the topic (
http://www.simulation-argument.com/). "Because their computers are so powerful, they could run a great many simulations," he writes in The Philosophical Quarterly.
So if there exist civilisations with cosmic simulating ability, then the fake universes they create would rapidly proliferate to outnumber the real ones. After all, virtual reality is a lot cheaper than the real thing. So by simple statistics, a random observer like you or me is most probably a simulated being in a fake world. And viewed from inside the matrix, we could never tell the difference.
Or could we? John Barrow, a colleague of Martin Rees at Cambridge University, wonders whether the simulators would go to the trouble and expense of making the virtual reality foolproof. Perhaps if we look closely enough we might catch the scenery wobbling.
He even suggests that a glitch in our simulated cosmic history may have already been discovered, by John Webb at the University of NSW. Webb has analysed the light from distant quasars, and found that something funny happened about 6 billion years ago - a minute shift in the speed of light. Could this be the simulators taking their eye off the ball?..." 
 
Wow, no lo puedo negar: este tema me fascina.
 

2 comentarios:

Anónimo dijo...

Es intersante el post el unico problema es que no son cientificos como tu aseguras, sino filosofos y son cosas totalmente distintas

Citius64 dijo...

Paul Davies, Martin Rees y John Barrow son físicos. Nick Bostrom es filósofo, pero hey, la filosofía es la reina de las ciencias como decían los antiguos...