Is the universe a big asynchronous distributed system?

Now that summer is approaching, I'll have a chance to do some reading.  One topic I've been fascinated by, for a few years now, centers on the way that research on quantum computing is shedding light on the way the universe itself is "programmed". I'm fascinated by something that for me, was a surprise: a connection to distributed computing.  I'm not one to write a whole book on this topic (I once tried, but then gave up).  I'll summarize sort of briefly.

The place to start is with a famous real experiment by John Wheeler, the Princeton quantum mechanics professor who passed away in 2008 without a Nobel prize. Seeking to debunk the "spooky action at a distance" (also called "Copenhagen") model of quantum mechanisms, Wheeler proposed a strange twist on those famous one and two slit interference experiments. His version worked like this:

You'll need a source of charged particles, very focused and able to run at low power (for example, one electron per millisecond). Then a beam splitter for that kind of beam, with a 50% probability of sending your beam "up" and a 50% probability of sending it "down". Mirrors reflect the beam back towards a narrow slit. And then you put a particle detector on the far side of the slit. A digital camera sensor will do the trick. You can find images of this, or of his two-slit version online (sometimes it is called a "delayed choice" experiment, but as we'll see, delay isn't the point).

Last, put a little detector on one arm of the experiment. If enabled, it will sense the passing electrons and report those by blinking an LED. But the detector should have an on-off switch. Initially, turn it off. The cool thing is that because our particle is charged, we can actually sense it without disturbing it, so the detector seemingly observes the particle without changing any property of the particle. (The "work" of turning the LED on or off is done by the detector hardware, not the particle beam. And you can even arrange the detector to be far enough from the path of the particle so that it will already have reached the camera and impacted the LCD screen before the "which way?" detection even occurs.)

Each single electron that passes through our system will actually hit just one pixel on the LCD screen of the camera on the far side of the slit. This is because a single electron delivers a single quantum of energy to a single LCD pixel: the image for just one electron would be just one very dim spot somewhere on the screen.  But if we run the experiment billions of times, we build up an image.

In this sense the image is a histogram revealing the underlying probabilities.  Each single run of the system (each electron) was a kind of probe of the probability density function of the system. Any given single electron picked an outcome at random among the possible outcomes, in accordance with the probabilities of each possible path and outcome. Thus we are visualizing the probability function -- the single electron itself wasn't smeared out at all. To get interference we really had no option except to run the experiment until billions of data points had been gathered. The interference pattern is the cumulative record of billions of individual events.

Well, lets run our experiment. What happens? As you might guess, this form of experiment reveals interference patterns: the electron has a 50-50 probability of taking the up path versus the down path. But this is true only with the LED that tracks the actual electron path turned off. If you turn on the LED detector... the pattern collapses to a bright dot! A very curious finding.

Even stranger: turn the detector on, but encase the LED output in a black bag so that no information about it escapes... the pattern reappears.

In effect, overtly "knowing" which way the electron went eliminates the diffraction pattern. Not sensing it at all, or destroying the data after sensing it, restore the diffraction pattern.

Sounds like magical nonsense? Yes, definitely. Yet this is a real experiment.  For me, it definitely deserved a Nobel prize.

Now, there are a few ways to make sense of such a finding. One is to consider relativistic time perspectives. If you do this, you quickly discover that concepts like "before" and "after" had no real meaning. Brian Greene's first book on modern physics discusses this and makes the point that causality is meaningful, but that non-causal concepts of time are ultimately subjective. Einstein was the first to realize this, and it underlies his theories of relativity. So was that sensor active when the particle passed? Yes, or no, depending on how you measured time. Not a well-posed question.

But people have done versions of this experiment in which the detector, and that decision, are physically quite far away. Using a speed of light argument, this version of the experiment potentially eliminates any relativistic question of interpretation.  Your decision genuinely, provably, occurs after the particles hit the LCD detector.  And seemingly, it lets you retroactively change the past. Cool, huh? And you thought that scenarios like this were the stuff of terrible TV serials.   Now you learn that they are just the stuff of terrible blogs!  But keep in mind: this is real science. 

Back to interpretations.  The second interpretation is the Copenhagen one. In this, the observation made by the which-way sensor collapses the quantum superposition that characterizes the system state, once the beam splitter has done its thing. The sense in which it is a spooky event is that seemingly, you can delay and decide whether or not to activate the which-way sensor until after the particle already hit the LCD pixel. Cool, huh? But utter nonsense if you believe that in reality, information cannot move backwards in time (faster than the speed of light). So people who adopt this view are tacitly accepting that quantum observations actually can move faster than the speed of light.

A third, more modern interpretation is called the many-worlds model. This model views the world as a giant quantum superposition. The superpositions are really non-quantum classical world-lines that follow Newtonian rules. So in a single world-line the behavior of our electron was fully determined by various factors: the specific electron hit the half-silvered mirror just when this molecule of aluminum dioxide was oriented just so, and hence it reflected up, deterministically. There was no probability involved at that step.

But a many-worlds model assumes that because we live at the tip of a causal cone stretching 13.8B years into the past, we only "know" a tiny amount about the universe in a causal sense of actual past observations. So in this model, each interaction between two elementary particles is an observation, and lives on into the causal future of both particles: an entanglement, but without any quantum fuzz. Today, we sit at the tip of this cone of past observations, but now think of all the unobserved state in the universe. Our world-line observed something (the state of the mirror) that was genuinely unpredictable. After the observation it was fully known.  Before observation, 50-50.

The many-worlds model holds that if both outcomes were equally probable, then this means that in some world-line the electron bounced up, and in others, it bounced down. The world lines were indistinguishable until that happened, but then each "learned" a different past.

So in this model, the arrow of time is concerned with increasing knowledge of the past. Any single world-line accumulates knowledge in a steady way.

Critically, no world-line ever collapses, vanishes, reverses course and changes its path. We just learn more and more as events progress.  The new knowledge rules out certain possibilities. Prior to hitting the mirror, it was genuinely possible that the electron might bounce up, and might bounce down. But after hitting the mirror, any world-line in which we "know" the state of the electron is one in which we have eliminated all uncertainty about that mirror interaction. By turning on the electron path detector, we eliminated all the uncertainty, and this is why the diffraction pattern vanished: with no uncertainty, our electron beam gives a sharp, tightly focused spot on the detector. 

How did this all explain our Wheeler experiment? Well, with the sensor turned off, an analysis of the probabilities of the various outcomes does give rise to an intersection not of the electron with itself, but rather of the two "branches" of the probabilistic state of the system, leading to the interference effect that we see as a pattern on our eventual LDC screen, built up one pixel at a time.  You can compute this pattern using Schrodinger's equation. With the sensor turned on, the probabilistic analysis is changed: if information from the sensor can reach the LDC detector, we eliminate uncertainty in a way that leaves us with a clean focused spot, or a clean set of lines (depending on how the slit is set up).

If you are big believer in quantum computing, you'll be happiest with this third model, although many people in that field tell me that they prefer not to think of it in terms of real-world interpretations ("shut up and compute" is the common refrain). No need to worry about the meaning of all those world-lines.  Are those other world-lines "real?" Well, in what sense is our reality objectively more real, or less real? Any objective attempt to define reality either ends up with an unmeasurable property, or concludes that any world-line that has some non-zero probability of arising is as real as any other.

In a similar vein, it is wise to avoid speculation about free will, and about whether or not such a model leaves room for religion.

I myself am a believer in the many-worlds interpretation. It eliminates spooky faster-than-light action at a distance and other oddities. We are left with something elegant and simple: causality, nothing more. Lacking knowledge of the current state, some things seem possible, with various probabilities. Then we learn things, and that rules out other things. Viola.

Now, how does this lead us towards a perspective relevant to computing, and distributed systems at that?

Well, we have these deterministic world-lines that are all about interactions of elementary particles (or maybe m-branes in the modern 11-dimensional string theories -- whatever your favorite most elementary model may be). Let me ask a small question: do you believe that all of this is governed by mathematics? Sure, mathematics we haven't fully learned yet, and without question, the mathematics may be very foreign to our normal mathematical systems. But do you believe that ultimately, the physical world is governed by physical law?

I myself do believe this: I have yet to hear of a physical situation that wasn't ultimately subject to a scientific explanation. So we are then looking at model of the universe in which strict mathematical laws govern the evolution of these world-lines from their initial state, back at the big bang when time began, up to the present, 13.8B years later.

There were a set of possible initial conditions, and each initial state gives rise to a world-line. But there are a seemingly infinite number of possible initial conditions consistent with the 13.8B years of observations prior to me typing these characters into this blog-page. I am uncertain as to those unobserved states, and hence unable to predict the actual future: in some sense, I am all of the me's in all of these identical (up to now) world-lines. Then time progresses, events occur (interactions between elementary particles), and more knowledge is learned. My experience is that I reside in the world lines consistent with my personal past. But other versions of me experience the other possible outcomes. And so it goes, branching infinitely.

How does the universe compute these next states? Here, we approach the distributed systems question. The first answer is that it does so by applying the (only partially known to us) physical laws to the states of the world-lines, in a Newtonian style, computing each next state from the current state. As it turns out, this deterministic world-line model is actually fully reversible, so you can run time backwards and forwards (obviously, if you run a world-line backwards the system forgets its future, and regains uncertainty, but you can do this if you wish -- quantum computers depend on this property and wouldn't work, at all, without it).

So what does it mean to have a single world-line and to apply the "next" events to it? Seemingly, the proper model requires that we combine two models: one to model space, and one to model particles, both quantized. So we think of space as a mesh of 3-D (or perhaps 10-D) locations, plus time if you want to reintroduce clocks -- I'll leave them out for a moment, but Brian Greene prefers to include them, adopting the view that events sweep forward at the speed of light, such that any particle is moving at speed c, as a vector in space+time. In Brian's explanation, a photon moves at speed c and experiences no movement in time at all: it experiences its entire existence as a single event in time, spread over space. An electron in motion moves through space at some speed, and then experiences time at whatever rate will give us speed c for its space-time vector. Cool idea (Einstein's, actually).

So we have this mesh of spatial locations. What does space "know?" Well, it knows of the local gravitational gradient (the proper term is the "geodesic"), it knows of nearby particles and their contribution to electromagnetic fields, and in fact it knows of other forces too: the weak and strong force, the Higgs field, etc. So space is a record of fields. And then the particles seemingly know where they are (which space-time location they are in), and where they are heading (their vector of movement), plus other properties like mass, spin, etc.

The distributed computation is one that takes each element of space-time from its state "now" to its state one interaction into the future. This involves interactions with the particles in the vicinity, and also interactions with the neighboring space-time locations. The particles, similarly, interact with space-time (for example, our electron might be pushed by a local magnetic field, causing its trajectory to change, and it would learn the prevailing EM field by interrogating the space-time location), and also with one-another (when particles collide). Perhaps the collisions can be fully expressed as interactions mediated through space-time -- that would be nice.

Very much to my taste, this particular model has a dynamic form of group membership! First, the presence of mass causes space-time itself to stretch: new space-time elements form. This would generate the geodesic mentioned earlier. For example, near a heavy mass, like as we approach the event horizon of a black hold, space-time curves: more spatial volume forms. Indeed, the infall of matter towards the singularity at the core of the black hole seemingly would cause an unbounded expansion of space-time, but entirely within the event horizon, where we can't actually see this happening. And then there is a second aspect, which is that as the most basic particles or m-branes combine or break apart, the population of particles seemingly changes too: perhaps, a neutron bangs into a proton, and a spray of other particles is emitted. As I said, the universal computation seems to track dynamic group membership!

Back to the real world (but here's a little Matrix-like puzzle, referring to the movie: if the universe is a superposition of world-lines and the world-lines are deterministic and governed by physics, and the physics ultimately has all the details filled in -- even if we don't know how the thing works, the universe itself obvious does -- does anyone need to run the computation? After all: there is a Taylor-series expansion of pi, and with it, I could compute the 2^2^2^2^2^...'th digit of pi in any radix you like. Perhaps I tell you that such and such a digit is 7, base 10. But that digit has never actually been computed by anyone except me. Would you trust me? No, but at the same time, you do have a way to validate the claim. The digit definitely has a defined value: my claim is either true, or false: it can't wiggle around and change value. So in a similar sense, the mathematics, given the initial conditions, predicts this moment, 13.8B years down the road. Do we care whether or not the computation has actually occurred? Is it meaningful to claim that we have some existence outside of this definition? And if so, how would you make that claim rigorous)?

At MIT, Scott Aaronson (who has since moved to Austin) and his colleague Seth Lloyd speculated about this -- two stars in the slowly growing field of quantum computing. Seth wrote book in which he argues that even the universe wouldn't be able to solve unsolvable problems -- we computer scientists do have Russell's Paradox to wrestle with, not to mention basic questions of complexity.  If a problem takes unbounded time and resources to compute, it may not be solvable even if there is an algorithm for performing the computation. In this sense all the digits of pi are computable, but some digits cannot be "reached" in the 13.8B years the universe has had to compute them: they are much further out there.

Seth's point is interesting, because it raises real questions about what the distributed computation that comprises the universe might be up to. Taking this point about pi a bit further: pi itself has no finite representation. Yet pi certainly arises in physics, along with many other transcendental constants. How can the universe actually carry out such computations in bounded time?

A few ideas: it could be computing symbolically. The actual mathematics of the universe might be expressed in a different mathematics than we normally use, in which those constants vanish into some other representation (think of the way a transformation to polar coordinates eliminates the need to talk about pi... although such a transformation also introduces a problem, namely that the (x,y,z) coordinate (0,0,0) has no single representation in a polar coordinate system: it has vector length 0, but the associated angle is undefined). Anyhow, perhaps there is a mathematics in which these constants don't arise in their unbounded-length form. Or perhaps the universe only needs to carry out the computation until it has enough digits to unambiguously determine the next state.

Traditional models of singularities pose issues too, once you start to think in terms of tractable mathematics (Seth's point is that if a problem can't be solved computationally, the universe must not be solving it -- either we have the physics wrong, or it has a clever work-around!) A singularity is infinitely small and infinitely dense: clearly not a state amenable to a state-by-state computation. Again, various ideas have been floated. Perhaps the singularity is just not reachable from within the universe: the particle falling into it needs an unbounded amount of time to get there, as perceived from outside (in fact from the outside, the particle remains smeared over the event horizon and the associated information mixes with that of other in-falling particles, and this is all we can know). Still, for the universe to be doing this calculation, we would need to figure out what it "does" for space-time locations closer and closer to the event horizon, and very likely that model needs to account for the behavior inside the black hole and at the singularity, too. Otherwise, the mathematics would be incomplete. Seth argues against such views: for him, the thing that makes a universe possible is that it is self-consistent and has a complete specification of initial state and the physical laws by which that state evolves.

Here at Cornell, my colleague Paul Ginsparg always has the answers to such questions, up to the event horizon. Beyond that, though... as I said, perhaps we shouldn't view the questions or answers as part of this universe. Yet Paul points out that an object passing the event horizon wouldn't notice anything unusual, including the increasingly extreme curvature of space-time. Whatever the mathematics are that govern the universe, they should still work in there.

And here's yet one more puzzle.  If computing the next state involves some form of computation over the entire universe, the associated physical model has to be wrong: such a computation couldn't be feasible.  Yet this seems to imply that much of contemporary physics is incorrect, because these unbounded integrals do arise (for example, contemporary models of quantum uncertainty assign a non-zero probability to finding a particular particle anywhere in the entire universe).

Instead, some form of boundedness must enter the picture. At a minimum, the computation shouldn't need to reach out to more of the universe than we have had time to interact with: an electron on my computer screen has interacted (at most) with particles within a causal cone stretching just 13.B years into the past, and in fact with just a tiny subset of those. This tells us that computing the next state is a finite problem, even if it is a bit large by computational standards. But it also tells us that as time elapses, it gets harder and harder for the universe to compute its own next state. Does it make any sense at all to imagine that physics works this way, or does the universe have some way to bound the computational task so that it would be of manageable scale?

Which leads to another insight.  Armed with our many-worlds hypothesis, suppose that all of us track down the URL of the "ANU quantum random number project."  As you might surmise, this project  uses quantum noise from outer space to generate what seem to be totally random numbers.  Now use those numbers as the basis for lottery ticket purchases in the next PowerBall drawing.  You'll win, in some world-line.  In fact, do it 50 times in succession.  If the game isn't rigged and you don't get arrested, kidnapped or killed, you'll win 50 times -- in some world-line.  But not in any world-line you are likely to actually be living in.

In fact there was an old science fiction story along these same lines: some very elderly fellow had lived an increasingly implausible life, surviving one catastrophe after another.  After all: if survival isn't impossible, but just very unlikely, then by definition there must be some possibility of surviving.  And in that world-line, you do indeed survive, and so forth.

Do low-probability events "really" ever occur?  Or does the universe somehow save itself the trouble and never compute them?  Could it be there is even some hidden natural law that cuts off absurdly low probability sequences?  Brian Greene discusses this too, in a chapter that asks whether the initial conditions of the universe would have allowed a kind of Petit Prince scenario: could the initial universe have started with a single planet in it, and a single person standing on that planet, fully aware and healthy, air to breath, but nothing else in the universe at all?  Extreme interpretations of the multi-verse theory seem to say that yes, such an initial condition would be possible.  But Greene argues that there is a sense in which all of these examples violate the second law of Thermodynamics: the law that says that entropy always increases (obviously, we can expend energy and create local order, but in doing so, we create even more entropy elsewhere).  So perhaps this law about entropy has a generalization that prunes low probability world-lines.

One could make the case that pruning low probability world-lines might be necessary because the total computational complexity of computing the universe would be too high if the universe were to compute every possible pathway, including all of these extremely obscure scenarios.  Pruning really obscure corner cases could be the key to computational tractability, in some very real sense (after all: many problems are infeasible in their general form, yet we manage to solve them computationally because we really only run into an easier subset that wouldn't normally include the very hard instances).  Is there a world-line out there where I actually won lotteries 50 times in a row, using those ANU quantum numbers?   Such a sequence would violate this generalized entropy principle.  So, maybe not, after all.  Sigh.  But on the positive side, that wouldn't have been a very fair way to win the lottery.  It would be nice if a natural law actually prevented it!

A fun topic. I'm always hungry for new books about it -- the people I've mentioned mostly have written such books (it seems to be a rite of passage for physicists). With summer arriving soon, let me know if  you have any to recommend!