Reminds me of <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0502072" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0502072</a><p>Also, as a Physicist and Computer Scientist, it explains my uneasiness when existence claims are made regarding infinite objects.<p>For example, we can <i>describe</i> the trajectory of a particle using Feynman path integrals, which involve infinite sums over all possible paths. That's fine.<p>Some will then treat this as a <i>mechanism</i>, i.e. claim that the <i>reason</i> particles have the trajectories they do, is because they <i>literally are</i> taking every possible path at once. This kind of reasoning sets my off my CS alarm bells, and articles like this provide justification for that.<p>To see why this leap of reasoning is flawed, consider the fact that <i>we</i> don't solve integrals by summing up an infinite number of infinitesimal quantities. To say that a human writing out a sequence of symbolic manipulations on a page <i>literally is</i> performing an infinite amount of computation is clearly false.<p>I think Computer Scientists are much more comfortable than Physicists with considering the role of calculation in a theory; i.e. in Physics, the calculations we perform <i>about</i> a system are utterly distinct from that system: whether those calculations are easy or hard says nothing about what the system is doing (e.g. we can easily calculate path integrals, which particles "solve" using an infinite amount of brute-force); the only physically-relevant details are the values. In CS, we <i>focus on</i> the performance of calculations; we cannot claim that a system behaves over time in some way unless we can show that <i>calculating</i> that behaviour can be done in that time.
Ooooo this topic has been intellectually tingling me for two weeks now - ontologies, knowledge, how we construct the line between abstract (mathematical objects) and reality (all the way down to elementary particles), and at its core the nature of information. If you're further interested in this area, some very interesting lines of inquiry to go down is the the mathematical universe hypothesis [1], bit-string physics [2] (the theory of everything that explains the universe as a binary string), digital physics [3] and of course the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy article on information [4].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/28404/" rel="nofollow">http://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/28404/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics</a><p>[4] <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information/" rel="nofollow">http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information/</a>