story and photo by Geoff Olson
How is the
I
Cosmos?
was walking along a beach in the Gulf Islands, on a brilliantly sunny afternoon. As I looked out to sea, my thoughts drifted to a news item I’d read earlier in the day. Out in the Pacific, between Hawaii and Japan, there are two vast islands of plastic garbage, held in place by swirling underwater currents. According to the Telegraph, the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex,” is believed to contain about 100 million tons of flotsam. It’s a plastic soup running to the depth of 10 metres, and twice the size of the continental United States. That’s right, two agglomerations of floating junk, totalling twice the size of the US. While some of this crap comes from storm-tossed container ships, most of it has been dumped off passenger ships and other vessels. But I’m not concerned here with the particulars of eco-catastrophe. With time running out, we desperately need new ways of thinking and feeling. The old ways are obviously broken beyond repair. I reached down to pick up a rock from the beach and cradled it in my hand. I appreciated its symmetry and smoothness, but there was nothing really remarkable about it. Like every other inanimate object, it’s essentially an inert thing. It’s as dumb as… well, a rock, I guess. Yet, according to the emerging science of “digital physics,” the rock’s true nature is pure information. This is true for everything on the beach and beyond. All matter and energy, and all of its evolving forms, are expressions of a massive parallel processing program – an inconceivably long and large cosmic computation. The universe is binary in nature, according to digital physics. Everything from crayfish to cathedrals to Cate Blanchette is the “output” of universal computation. All biological and cultural evolution, all our hopes and dreams, our aches and pains and flights of joy, ultimately derive from binary operations. It all seems a bit counterintuitive. If I were to accidentally drop the rock on 20 .
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MARCH 2008
my foot, I wouldn’t normally say I had an interaction with information. But science has a way of surprising us. In the 1970s, computer scientist John Conway came up with The Game of Life, a computer game in which organic-looking patterns and self-replicating “entities” emerged on a computer screen from a few simple, repeating rules. In the 1980s, the eminent theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler, a collaborator with Einstein, claimed that atoms are made up of bits of information. “Every ‘it’ – every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions.” Zen philosopher Alan Watts said virtually the same thing back in the sixties, albeit in a more poetic way. He called it the cosmic game of Yes and No. The vibratory buzz of existence derives from microscopic transitions between on and off states, he claimed, drawing on the ideas of Taoism. By the eighties, the idea of cosmic computation was enough of a sci-fi staple that author Douglas Adams could lampoon it in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. (The ultimate answer to the riddle of existence, “42,” was a source of great confusion to the book’s characters.) The magnum opus of digital physics arrived in 2002, with A New Kind of Science, a huge tome by mathematician Stephen Wolfram. At the age of 13, Wolfram won a MacArthur “genius grant” and went on to make a fortune from his academic software program Mathematica. He used the proceeds to finance the publication of his 1,200page brainbuster. For some reviewers the book was the ultimate in vanity publishing. Here was a guy who had the temerity to say he’d discovered a whole “new science”! A flurry of scientific interest followed, but the book’s daunting size put off many reviewers.
