For the last few years, I have been pursuing amateur research in Digital Physics—the study of the extent to which algorithmic systems can be used to emulate natural phenomena. My focus has been specifically on particles, quantum phenomena, and Planck-length descriptions of space-time. So far I've spoken at two international conferences, NKS Midwest 2008, and JOUAL 2009, and have two papers that will be coming out shortly, both in the journal Complex Systems. The abstracts are shown below. Pre-prints are available upon request, and you can find the slides I use right here:
NKS Slides
JOUAL Slides
My new research has been on duplicating some of the more delicate and unusual properties of quantum mechanical systems, namely self-interference, and the violation of Bell's Inequality. The results so far have been very exciting, and a new paper is in the works.
If you want to find out more about what I do, I've started a digital physics blog at How To Build A Universe with my research collaborator Dan Miller. Also, you can see the output from some of my experiments on YouTube.The primary goal of Digital Physics research is to provide a description of the physical universe in terms of simple programs. One approach to attaining this goal is the creation of a toolbox of algorithms that reproduce the behavior of basic quantum phenomena. As a step in this direction, we have developed a simple pseudo-particle algorithm that exhibits rotationally-invariant, glider-like motion across graphs in two or more dimensions. We apply this algorithm to a range of lattice and irregular graphs from the sparse to the densely-connected, and show how rotationally-invariant motion can be easily obtained from irregular graphs that are sufficiently densely-connected. Such graphs are also shown to be potentially compatible with spatial curvature and relativistic invariance. This work points the way toward a class of algorithms that can be used to tightly approximate the basic phenomena encountered in particle physics, while maintaining the desired properties of discreteness, determinism, and algorithmic simplicity.
Digital Physics seeks to help answer problematic open questions in Quantum Gravity by bringing to bear techniques from Computer Science. One approach to this endeavor is the creation of a toolbox of algorithms that can reliably simulate basic quantum phenomena. To facilitate this goal, we explore the extent to which set-based, pseudo-particle algorithms and dense, irregular graphs can be made to emulate the behaviors of naturally occurring fundamental particles. We investigate the relation between dense graphs and pseudo-particles traversing them, which has profound implications for limits on particle information and may provide an experimental tool for testing the geometric properties of quantized space. We also show that behaviors with properties such as particle polarization are easy to generate with this approach.