
A New “Theory of Everything”: Reality Emerges from Cosmic Copyright Law - jonbaer
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-theory-of-everything-reality-emerges-from-cosmic-copyright-law/
======
Snail_Commando
Per `dang's suggestion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7803158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7803158),
here's the link to the paper so that we may consolidate the threads:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563](http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563)

Edited to steal more screenspace/add context:

Authors:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120402224250/http://193.189.74...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120402224250/http://193.189.74.53/~qubitor/people/david/structure/Documents/By%20Other%20People/PhilosophyNow.html)

[http://edge.org/memberbio/chiara_marletto](http://edge.org/memberbio/chiara_marletto)

You may also be interested in this paper:

[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantu...](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantum_theory.pdf)

Also, [http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-
theory](http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory)

------
zak_mc_kracken
I'm a big Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fan, but I'm always bothered whenever this
quote surfaces:

> Once you have eliminated the impossible,” the fictional detective Sherlock
> Holmes famously opined, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
> truth.

This is terrible advice, even more so when mentioned in a scientific
publication. This recommendation is the antithesis of what the scientific
method is about and a text book example of an argument from ignorance.

You don't pick an explanation because you have run out of ideas to explain a
phenomenon, for the simple reason that there might be other explanations you
have not considered.

The time to believe something is when there is evidence to back it up.

~~~
pdkl95
The key word in that quote is "eliminated". Try this more modern translation:

"Once you have _falsified_ every other possible hypothesis, whatever
hypothesis remains is the one we'll promote to a _theory_."

Holmes' is not saying you get to just make things up - he's trying to explain
that instead of trying to prove something directly, inverting your perspective
and falsifying as many incorrect interpretations ("the impossible") should
always work - even if yo don't _understand why_.

That quote is an incredibly efficient summarization of the scientific method's
core philosophy that (because you can't prove a positive), you falsify wrong
hypothesis instead.

~~~
zak_mc_kracken
> That quote is an incredibly efficient summarization of the scientific
> method's core philosophy that (because you can't prove a positive), you
> falsify wrong hypothesis instead.

I disagree and I'll repeat what I said above: this is the antithesis of the
scientific method. It's faith based and it opens the door to accepting
hypotheses that have zero evidence to back them up. Follow this reasoning and
you can just make things up.

~~~
cyxxon
In what way is that faith based? It seems to me that falsifying hypothesis
until only one remains seems to be pretty scientific. Especially considering
that (with regards to science, not solving a murder mystery) that means the
world is forever stuck with whatever hypothesis was left at the end because we
just didn't think of something else... the same principle or technique can
always be used again...

~~~
el_zorro
The problem is that, in practice, there is no way to guarantee that you have
actually eliminated every possibility. There are ways to constrain the answer
within physics, but that doesn't always mean you have an explanation. Besides,
within the scientific method (at least in my field of physics) emphasis is
placed more on the predictions the answer can make, rather than the simple
explanations. Simply eliminating other answers _might_ give you an explanation
for a singular case, but it fails to give you the predictive power we demand
from all theories.

~~~
meric
You gotta admit it works with mathematical proofs by contradiction.

~~~
zak_mc_kracken
Not really. Proof by contradiction means starting with the negation of the
hypothesis you're trying to prove and then reach an impossible conclusion,
thereby proving your hypothesis was wrong.

It still involves a rigorous logical reasoning, not accepting something
because you're running out of ideas.

~~~
meric
If you're defining the technique as not using logic, merely running out of
ideas, of course its not logical and wouldn't work in practice. I don't see
how what you described as not being 'eliminating the impossible', personally.

------
skore
Always love to see new ideas from my apparently-alternate-universe, yet
equally-named human copy. What a brilliant mind! Keeps reminding me to seek
for deeper answers.

Really a shame that they went for such a strangely click-baity title for what
was otherwise a good article, though. This has nothing to do with Copy _right_
and nowhere does the article even attempt to hold up the terrible metaphor.

------
yxhuvud
So if I understand this correctly, this seems a bit similar to how math is
built upon a defined set of axioms, which the rest is then derived from.

Given that the axioms they choose are powerful enough, this approach should
yield falsifiable results, because if a result turns out to be false, then one
of the axioms will turn out not to apply.

------
anbu32
Lubos Motl has written a pretty harsh takedown:

[http://motls.blogspot.no/2014/05/constructor-theory-
deutsch-...](http://motls.blogspot.no/2014/05/constructor-theory-deutsch-and-
marletto.html)

~~~
Gravityloss
I see he's still as obnoxious like always. He makes points, though I'm not
qualified to say whether they are valid. I wish he could be more restrained.

That said, if someone like David Deutsch publishes such theories with grand
predictions, they deserve criticism.

~~~
orbifold
I scanned the paper and I feel like most of the criticism by Motl is more or
less justified. They introduce non-standard notation for things that would
probably benefit from a treatment within well established mathematical
language. For example their discussion of non clonability of
"superinformation", whatever that is, could probably be resolved by working
within a non-cartesian monoidal category (which is a standard tool in Quantum
logic).

------
habosa
> According to constructor theory, the most fundamental components of reality
> are entities—“constructors”—that perform particular tasks, accompanied by a
> set of laws that define which tasks are actually possible for a constructor
> to carry out. For instance, a kettle with a power supply can serve as a
> constructor that can perform the task of heating water .... “You simply say
> that the task of creating energy from nothing is impossible.”

Looks like someone is getting into OOP:

    
    
        // Defined
        (new Kettle()).boil(new Water());
    
        // Exception
        Universe.createEnergyFrom(null)
    
    

(yes, I'm joking with this post. But I did find the parallel to be funny)

~~~
superqd
I think it's more than a parallel.

~~~
jamiek88
The whole 'universe as simulation' idea is spooky.

------
terminalcommand
Well, I'd like to read the published paper. Anyone who is interested in
quantum computing comes to his/hers analogies and beliefs of the underlying
laws of the universe. The discussions on digital physics have been around
since Zuse. I can't see why they claim that they have found something
groundbreaking. In my opinion, this theory is closer to philosophy rather than
quantum mechanics.

~~~
saint-loup
David Deutsch, coauthor of the paper, is not without credibility in the field
of quantum computing, to say the least.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch)

It's obviously a speculative theory, but it's a welcomed endeavor, since the
field is sorely lacking conceptual frameworks to make sense of scientific
advances.

Link to the paper:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563](http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563)

------
bencollier49
Can any physicists on here tell me if this new theory actually predicts
anything? Is it falsifiable?

~~~
macspoofing
Falsifiability is so last century ([http://edge.org/response-
detail/25322](http://edge.org/response-detail/25322)) =)

~~~
aninhumer
I don't really understand the argument here. It starts to explain a difference
between "falsifiable" and "empirical", but then it goes off on an example that
I don't understand at all.

Imagining an unobservable multiverse might be a useful way to think about a
problem, and it might lead to an elegant way to make predictions, but all we
can conclude from that scientifically is "the universe behaves as if there
were a multiverse". There's no need to assert that such a multiverse actually
exists, and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor.

If the article wants to argue that sometimes describing observable behaviour
in terms of unobservable entities is neater than the alternative, that's
entirely reasonable. But it seems to me that it's trying to argue that the
existence of a multiverse is something unfalsifiable that's still scientific,
and I don't agree with that at all.

But maybe I'm just misunderstanding something, I don't know that much about
theoretical physics after all.

~~~
dllthomas
_" and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor."_

That depends on your particular formulation of Occam's Razor. If you're
looking at "amount of stuff", it's hard to beat "my experience behaves as if
there were a universe".

------
marknadal
> “In principle, everything possible in our universe could be written down in
> a big book consisting of nothing but tasks [and in] this big book will also
> be encoded all of the laws of physics.”

This is hardly a grand "Theory of Everything" and a lot more like a messy rule
book of exceptions and edge cases, that attempts to cover all rules for
classical and quantum systems.

~~~
Terr_
So... The "just because" theory of existence?

------
michaelfeathers
I laughed when I saw that used the name of a C++ for the theory.

The word 'constructor' may have been used in niche places before it was
adopted by the language but I've never seen it used outside of it.

~~~
mooism2
Lots of languages have constructors. Some of them aren't even object oriented.

~~~
chriswarbo
Indeed, the wording of the article even made me think of type theory and
functional programming.

> For instance, a kettle with a power supply can serve as a constructor that
> can perform the task of heating water.

kettle power_supply water : (water * heat)

> You simply say that the task of creating energy from nothing is impossible.

first_law : (Null -> energy) = _|_

> In principle, everything possible in our universe could be written down in a
> big book consisting of nothing but tasks

This sounds like an enumeration (eg. a Goedel numbering) of programs, or
alternatively of a (program, runtime) quarter-plane.

> The collaborators then go on to define the concept of a “superinformation”
> medium that encodes messages that specify particular physical states—in this
> case, one in which copying is impossible

Sounds like substructural type systems and linear (or affine) types.

