How does the universe decide what’s going to happen next? Basically it’s running a massively parallel, real-time, infinite-precision numerical simulation.

Real-time because it happens in real time as it happens. Duh. This is just included to place it in context vis-a-vis our computer simulations.

Massively parallel because every particle, every point on a wave front, every bit of space is a node in a network computation. Each node computes with every other node (mostly those nearby or with which it’s entangled) to decide what it’s going to do in the next time step.

Infinite-precision means infinite precision. Now you might think that time and/or space are quantized,so there are smallest units of each (a rather popular point of view), and thus the universe can’t use infinite precision. First if that’s true, then I just mean as precise as physical reality allows. Second if that’s true, whatever the universe does is correct with infinite precision by definition. Thirdly it’s not true… if it were then energy and momentum couldn’t be well conserved. See forthcoming article on space and time being continuous.

Numerical simulation because it’s not not plugging values into an equation to get next steps. It is plugging values into equations to get interactions between each node and all other nodes, and it does it for all the nodes, and then advances them all simultaneously. It doesn’t have closed-form solutions like we do, which make us think we understand things and have figured out how they work. That ain’t how they work.

How does it do it do again? It runs a massively parallel, real-time, infinite-precision numerical simulation.

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