A long time ago, it seems back in the last century, during some small tournament in What? Where? When? the author of the article had to play a funny question. Naturally, the full text of it was not preserved in memory, I will give you how it was remembered in meaning.
In one of his travels, Iyon Tikhiy ended up with a professor who imitated life with computer programs, and each of the members of society, placed in a metal box, was programmed to be a separate person, and all these personalities interact with each other. A madman lived in a separate box.
The question went something like this - what was his madness? The answer was that he considered himself a computer program enclosed in an iron box. What actually was in reality.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, many quite sane and adequate people in all seriousness declare that our world is nothing more than a kind of virtual reality created by some kind of super-civilization. Very often, such statements are nothing but a dummy, such as a photo of a UFO suspended by a string behind glass.
It happens that this argumentation is even well grounded, but does not go beyond the evidence base, like - but it may be so.
But sometimes there are also witty arguments, when the author of the next proof gives rather serious arguments in support of his point of view. Let's try to understand the evidence voiced in the following video:
Promotional video:
I want to make a reservation right away - in this case I do not seek to prove or disprove anything. In my opinion, this is the same unprovable question as the existence / non-existence of God, the afterlife and supernatural reality in general. Everyone is entitled to their point of view, and here we are just considering the argumentation of a specific video.
So let's go.
0:50. Elon Musk believes that we live in the matrix. Yes to health. And many are sure that on a flat Earth - personal opinion is not an argument (even if it is covered by a big name such as Musk or Hawking - you give differential equations with solutions regarding our planet).
1:30 - 2:40. For computer games, the out-of-focus image is simplified. It is logical what to say. Make a program in which always and everywhere detailed drawing of images and physical interactions - and no one will buy your game. For almost all computers, it will be difficult (you do not play on military supercomputers), and the creators will go bankrupt.
2:45. Game of Civilization 5. I personally play version 4 of the game, and in the last century I played the very first. The five turned out to be unsuccessful in reality, but it seems to give no reason to talk about the virtuality of the world.
3:35. Microbes and mosquitoes are not loaded in the game. Duck, after all, if they are not important for the gameplay before them and no one cares, no one simply programs them. Well, the computer will reach a million terraflops for the authors of the video - will the fate of trillions of microbes and thousands of mosquitoes be important to them while jogging in Stalker on the way? They will never be programmed. There is a principle of reasonable sufficiency.
4:30. “The waves passed through the slit” - but here is not a completely correct understanding of physics. It was not the wave itself that passed through the slot, but the secondary wave generated by it. A chain of small flaws begins, which in the end is capable of generating a cumulative explosion of errors.
The author conducts an experiment in a liquid and claims that the wave energy is maximum directly opposite the slit. This is already a complete misunderstanding of the physical process. Before us is a surface wave, like a stone thrown into a lake, and its energy is the same in all directions. It's just that the farther from the center, the longer the wave has to travel, and it weakens for natural reasons (deceleration of molecules inside the liquid and at the interface between the media).
4:50 am. “If the top of one wave meets the top of another wave, then they cancel each other out” - Well, this is already a gross mistake. Vertices just reinforce each other. Blanking occurs when a top meets a trough. When two valleys meet, a deep depression is formed.
5:40 am. Not small particles of light are released, but light waves.
7:00 am - 7:35 am. Destruction of the wave function of particles. In fact, the function did not collapse and did not disappear anywhere, the observer simply changed the experimental conditions by the fact of observation.
Imagine - you want to measure the air temperature in a very small volume - 2 times larger than the volume of your thermometer. Carefully, like a piston, you slide your thermometer in. Five minutes later, you pull out the thermometer and look at it, proudly announce that before the experiment began, the temperature was 25 Celsius.
You're right? The fact of the matter is that no !!! After pushing in the thermometer, the volume for air decreased sharply, the molecules began to run faster, that is, the air warmed up. The question is - what was the temperature before the start of the experiment? The answer is - who knows! The analogy I think is clear.
7:50. In fact, the wave of probability cannot be simplified, since its calculations are extremely difficult!
9.00 Copenhagen interpretation. Of course, it is not necessarily true, but at the present stage of the development of physics, it is quite suitable for explaining almost all the phenomena of the microworld. The best is the enemy of good, but no one has yet proposed a better interpretation of what is happening. However, the author of the video is absolutely right - it does not deny our existence in virtual reality at all. Truth does not prove it.
9.25-9.50 Multi-world interpretation. She is really popular in scientific circles and in her own way explains well what is happening. This interpretation is especially popular among science fiction writers - one of the most beautiful and at the same time accessible versions of this interpretation can be found in Vladislav Krapivin's trilogy "The Dovecote in a Yellow Glade". Although there is no scientific basis there, the book is very powerful.
10.00 - 10.35. Schism in the scientific world. Well, scientific disputes are intended to determine the truth - many scientists rejected the existence of quarks, finding quite logical explanations. And some deny it even now.
10.40 - 11.40 "Microparticles pass in the form of waves" - This phrase contains an internal contradiction. Any such object is both a corpuscle and a wave at the same time. It is simply impossible to remove the corpuscular component of an object by passing it through a slit.
“At this moment, the electrons become particles, the way they were when launched from the electron gun” - they never stopped being them. If the electrons somehow (I can't imagine exactly how this could be) lose their corpuscular part of nature, they will turn into anything, but they will no longer be exactly electrons.
12.10 - 12.35 Time slows down at sublight speeds. Well, judging by the formulas it really slows down. And there were experiments, that's right. True, I have never heard of an experiment where the time dilation would be greater than the total maximum measurement error. Simply put, the fact that your thermometer outside the window shows 15 degrees does not mean at all that there is really 15 degrees. The instrumental error is 1 scale division - there MOST ONLY 15 degrees, but there can be any value in the range from 14 to 16 degrees. So the experiments carried out scientifically proved nothing. They just showed that MOST of all time dilation is real.
The spacecraft is moving at a speed of 300,000 km / s. Again we meet a complete misunderstanding of physics. Not a single material body is capable of reaching the speed of light (by the way, it is slightly less), although it can approach it infinitely.
Here I would like to turn to that part of physics called thermodynamics, or rather to its beginnings. The 3rd law of thermodynamics has many different formulations - for example, the entropy of a closed system increases. But personally, I am closer to the formulation in the form of Nernst's thermal theorem, it says - Absolute zero is unattainable. The analogy is obvious.
Next, let's imagine purely theoretically that the ship has managed to reach the speed of light. Let's leave the time on Earth and on the ship, but just see what should happen to the ship according to the formulas. Its linear dimensions (length, width, height) will decrease to zero, but the mass will grow to infinity. Does this accidentally remind you of anything? That's right - before us is a singularity, from which one step is to the Big Bang and the emergence of a new universe.
12.50 It is impossible to accelerate faster than the speed of light. In scientific circles, there is an assumption about the existence of particles with the code name "tachyons", whose speed is necessarily higher than the speed of light, they cannot SLOW to the speed of light. It is clear that it is incredibly difficult to detect the presence of such particles, although they must somehow interact with the world of sublight speeds.
13.30 When the computer freezes, the game time slows down. Here everything seems to be logical - the speed of light (and in the interpretation of the author of the video, the speed of the system update) slows down and when it completely freezes becomes equal to zero - the game stops completely. I think this is a pretty strong argument for a virtual reality perspective.
In the next part, we will move on to parsing the state of quantum entanglement. It is extremely difficult to understand it. But by controlling the spin of one of the entangled objects, we can change the spin of the other. Thus, by changing the spin of the first quantum, at least according to the Morse code principle, we can get exactly the same instantaneous response from the second object, no matter how far away it is. And this is an instantaneous transmission of information at interstellar distances.
14.01 - 14.50. Deciphering the meaning of the concept of "spin" looks rather simplified, but an ordinary viewer cannot understand more complex material. However, there are no errors in the presentation.
14.50 - 15.00. Before the appearance of the observer, the photon has no spin. Well, this is a classic case of an observer's influence on the course of the experiment itself. This has already been discussed in the first part of the analysis using the example of a thermometer and temperature. The author of the video continues to be silent about the possibility of such an influence.
15.00 - 16.15. There is a very logical explanation for the state of quantum entanglement.
16.15 - 16.36. Spaced out entangled photons almost instantly change (or acquire) orientation. I do not understand at all what surprises the author of the video? Only that we do not yet know all the laws of the physics of the microworld? But we, alas, do not recognize them, since there is simply no limit to knowledge.
Then the author claims that there is nothing faster than the speed of light. And here you can see the look of an amateur who has a decent knowledge of physics, but alas, by the top. If you dig deeper, then faster than the speed of light in a vacuum is the VELOCITY OF LIGHT IN VACUUM, or rather the train (group) speed of light. Explain that this is only possible for a person with solid training in physics, and not within the framework of one article, but it is.
16.40 - 17.20. Einstein disagrees with the Copenhagen theory. Well, good. True, Einstein is still a super-value in the Theory of Relativity, and the quantum theory was created by Max Planck.
17.20 - 18.26. John Bell refutes Einstein. That's right - the new is replacing the old. At one time, Einstein himself largely refuted Isaac Newton. Did this reduce the contribution of the English genius to science?
18.30 - 19.05. A group of physicists is measuring the rate at which a change in spin is transmitted from one entangled particle to another. They failed to measure it. Well - at one time and Galileo failed to measure the speed of light. It's all about the imperfection of the equipment - both then and now.
19.06 - 20.10. the video states that only in the virtual world is the instantaneous transmission of information possible, since entangled particles are two parts of one computer program and information does not need to cover a distance. Needless to say - the argument in favor of the virtuality of our existence is very powerful.
I am very far from computer technology, so I have a very relative idea of the functioning of programs inside the processor itself. However, I also know for certain that any computer action is carried out by applying a low voltage signal or a high voltage signal (relative to each other, of course) to one or another output - approximately the way brain synapses work.
But the speed of light is limited, like the speed of any electromagnetic wave. Consequently, the transmission rate of the electrical signal inside the processor is also limited. Of course - the speed of computers is very high - but this is due to the small size of the processor and it will not become infinitely large. Just because of the limited speed of light.
Something the creators of the video did not think of here.
20.30. There should be a theory that unites micro and macrocosm. In the circles of physicists, there are persistent rumors about the possible existence of a theory of "all-discovery", which will allow linking all (generally all) laws of physics together. So far, these are only rumors, but after all, scientific knowledge of the world began not so long ago.
20.40 - 21.00. Well - the theory of simulation can quite explain anything - even the tunnel effect that nobody wants. Slightly paraphrasing the song, we get - the Programmer was drunk, very stubborn, he would never have been seen. You never know what you program for a drunken shop. Otherwise, I do not see an explanation for the tunnel effect in the simulation.
21.00 - 22.30. There are speculations about what the knowledge that we live in the matrix will give us. In principle, any scientific discovery in one way or another gives humanity a new impetus in technological or spiritual development.
Short summary
First of all, I don't care if we live in the matrix or not. As a materialist, I do not reject this possibility, although I do not believe in it.
I consider the existence of so-called “chronomirages” and “involuntary chronauts” (if both are really real) as possible evidence of our life in the matrix. These two points are perfectly explained by malfunctions in the matrix computer programs.