01 · THE QUESTION
Is the universe computable?
If the world runs on rules, something ought to be able to run them. Gödel, chaos and thermodynamics all disagree about how far that goes.
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Science, AI and the Gravity of Underlying Questions.
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Explore how science really works, how it shapes the world around us, and how AI and machine learning are transforming scientific research and education. Watch the video. Then take it apart.
Two-body orbit: closed, periodic, exactly solvable
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02 · THE PICTURES
Four pictures it keeps returning to
A proof, a trajectory, a machine made of four rules, and the room where “in principle” first started costing electricity.
Turing: public domain. Glider gun (Lucas Vieira) and ENIAC: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. The attractor is computed for this page.
03 · VIEWPOINTS
Two readings, both defensible
We publish the strongest case against our own reading. If the counter-argument is weak here, that is our failure.
For computability
Every physical process we have examined turns out to be simulable given enough resources. “Enough resources” is an engineering complaint, not a metaphysical one.
The position the video leans towardAgainst
Undecidability is not a resource complaint: no amount of compute settles it. And treating the universe as executing a computation smuggles in a substrate and a clock no physics requires.
The strongest objection we could find04 · DISCUSSION
The argument is already running
This week: if a model predicts a material’s behaviour correctly but no one can say why, has physics been done?
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