[winterismute]

I have always been fascinated by the problem of quantum gravity but, well, it somehow happened "too late", after I got also very deeply into "computing" (mostly HPC, GPGPU, rendering). Does anybody know if there is a way for somebody with my background to actually help/contribute in advancing this field?

[gilbetron]

Go work for a university in the physics department, they're always looking for help writing software ... of course it only works if you're willing to work cheaply ;)

[tim333]

I have a personal theory that we have not been able to crack quantum gravity and similar because it's too much for human brains in the same way that we have a job visualising 5d space and dogs don't understand relativity. In which case AI going beyond human brain limits might be the way to crack it. Go build it!

[rvba]

I always wonder if we could draw some parallels between an universe and a simulation.

Time -> reason why universe is expanding

Lots of quantum mechanic problems -> something that actually in theory could be simulated - but "lots of stuff is happening at the same time" (tons of fields and particles flying around, so things are "unpredictable")

Particles are not particles but manifolds

Time slows down around heavy objects like black holes - the same way servers slow down when they have this massive battle of thousands of ships in Eve online -> it is difficult to run a simulation

So the question would be, can we escape one layer up -> to the virtual machine what is simulating our reality? Same way some program can escalate privilege and see what is inside the system. What would be a good way to escalate privileges and break free from a virtual machine? And by this, I mean the theoretical machine that runs our reality?