Physics:Fredkin finite nature hypothesis

In digital physics, the Fredkin finite nature hypothesis states that ultimately all quantities of physics, including space and time, are discrete and finite. All measurable physical quantities arise from some Planck scale substrate for information processing. Also, the amount of information in any small volume of spacetime will be finite and equal to a small number of possibilities.

Conceptions

Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind of Science, Chapter 9, considered the possibility that energy and spacetime might be secondary derivations from an informational substrate underlying the Planck scale. Fredkin's "Finite Nature" and Wolfram's ideas on the foundations of physics might be relevant to unsolved problems in physics.

Fredkin's ideas on inertia

According to Fredkin, "the computational substrate of quantum mechanics must have access to some sort of metric to create inertial motion. Whether or not higher level processes in physics can access this process is another story." According to Edward Witten, "string theory leads in a remarkably simple way to a reasonable rough draft of particle physics unified with gravity"; if Fredkin is correct about inertia, then there is the highly controversial hypothesis that the foundations of physics might depend upon either string theory with the infinite nature hypothesis or some modified version of string theory with Fredkin's finite nature hypothesis, in which inertial mass-energy obeys Milgrom's modified Newtonian dynamics and not the equivalence principle.

See also

• Calculating Space
• Digital philosophy

External links

• Fredkin's website Digital Philosophy.org
• Fredkin's 1992 "Finite Nature" paper
• Abstract for Fredkin's 2005 paper "A contemporary architecture for physics"
• A New Kind of Science