Paul's blog

Modern digital computers are clock driven.

That means that there is a clock inside your computer that ticks.  Tick, tock, tick, tock …

And at every tick (and tock) the computer DOES something. It executes an instruction (or, to be fair, in modern pipelined processors, an atomized part thereof).

From a computer program’s point of view it’s without meaning to ask what happens between tick and tock.

If the clock would miss a beat, there is, in principle (meaning, without help of external circuitry), no way for the computer program to detect that. It could have been stalled for YEARS, and it wouldn’t know it.

It’s a consequence of being a ‘digital’ computer, in which everything happens in discrete steps.

This in contrast with our own world where everything is, as we call it, analog … where everything is smooth and connected. Where there isn’t an ‘atom’ of time, and where even the tiniest piece of ‘length’ can be divided by 2.

Or is it (time)? And can it (length)?

What if there IS a smallest unit of time? And lenght? Units for which the question “what is smaller than that” is like asking “what is north of the North Pole”? If that was the case … dang .. then we WOULD be living in a digital world after all. That would almost sound as if reality as we know it, IS computer generated! As if we were living, and experiencing life, in a holographic environment simulator .. we could be someone’s misguided highschool project.

Now … guess what!

Yes … there IS a smallest unit of time. And length.

Anyone familiar with Quantum Physics knows them: They’re called Planck-time and Planck length.

This begs the question: then  … WHAT is reality?

This opens a new category for my blog, called ‘Quantum Reality’: I will soon post more on that.

But for now (leaves holodeck) .. “Computer: save program!”

 

 

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