[dllthomas]

The article is conflating "the universe is a computer" with "the universe can be described as a computational process, generating later states from earlier ones." I could certainly see this assumption creeping in unnoticed in various places, though I have no clue as to whether that's the case or what the ramifications are. If it's a correct assumption, of course, then it doesn't matter that it's been assumed all over.

[svachalek]

Math, computation, and physics are not things we crafted from nothing; they were explicitly made as tools to describe and predict the universe around us and we continue to use them because they work so well.

But relativity killed the simple, clean model of Newtonian physics by kicking out the underlying assumptions, and I like the idea that at least somebody's considering the possibility that maybe our deepest, most fundamental premises are completely wrong.

I have no idea how anyone who's gone all the way through to a physics Ph.D. is going to be able to unlearn those assumptions though, that sounds incredibly difficult.