Arguments for the automaton
On this page some reasons will be summarized which speak for the assumption that the universe is a cellular automaton.
From Richard P. Feynman comes the sentence: "I think I can say with certainty that nobody understands quantum mechanics." From what I have discovered so far, it seems that the reason the quantum world strikes us as so strange and incomprehensible is that we have not yet sufficiently considered the possibility that space and time might be discrete, causing behaviors in the quantum world that we do not know from our macroscopic world.
If one assumes that space and time are discrete, then this allows very simple and also descriptive physical explanations for the phenomena from the quantum world, which the Standard Model either cannot explain at all, or only in a cumbersome way. How these physically descriptive explanations look, is shown in the following.
Light speed
Today's Standard Model has no physical explanation for what exactly in the
universe is responsible for there being a maximum speed. If space and time
of the universe were indeed a continuum, then any continuous speed should
be possible. But if the universe is a cellular automaton, with discrete
space and discrete time, then there is a very simple reason for a maximum
speed: And that is that an object in the space lattice can advance at most
only one elementary length per beat.
By defining the meter, the elementary length was assigned the value of
On the most elementary level of the automaton, only this one speed actually exists. It can neither be exceeded nor undercut.
Photons are information structures which are designed in such a way that they travel in a straight line with exactly one elementary length per beat in the automaton, and thus, from a macroscopic point of view, always have maximum speed.
Other particles, such as the electron, also move at the most elementary level with maximum speed - i.e. with one elementary length per beat, only they do not move exactly in a straight line through space, but follow a more complex pattern of motion, so that from a macroscopic point of view it looks as if their speed is always less than the maximum speed.
Spin
The spin - for example of an electron has all properties of a classical
mechanical angular momentum. It also has the same units as an angular
momentum, but can only assume the value of
Again, the question arises: what exactly in the universe limits the spin value to ½?
If space and time are a continuum, then any spin should be possible. But if one assumes that the space of the universe is a space lattice and that also the time is quantized, then of course also the movements in this lattice are quantized. This is just noticeable on elementary level, like the spin of an elementary particle. One notes how simple and obvious this explanation is for a phenomenon for which the present science offers no explanation.
Non-classical movement
Since the discovery that particles do not move on classical paths, it is
known that there is no such thing as a "transport of matter through space".
Until today, however, the Standard Model has no answer to the question what
a non-classical motion should be at all. We may have developed mathematical
methods to calculate the statistical probability of a particle's location,
but this says nothing about how nature realizes motion. What is motion as
a physical reality? Open a physics book of your choice, you will not find
an answer to this basic question.
However, if one assumes that the universe is a cellular automaton, then it can be explained in a simple way how a non-classical motion looks like: Namely, exactly the same as in a cellular automaton. Here movement is non-classical, i.e. there is no transport of matter through the space, but only basic elements of the automaton change their states, like in a computer a bit switches from 0 to 1. Information computes itself in a more or less complex way through the space, see e.g. GAME OF LIFE.
(Graphic: https://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Gun)
The assumption that the universe is a cellular automaton thus offers, for the first time in the history of physics, an explanation of what motion as a physical reality is in the first place. This is a question that has been ignored for decades.
Heisenberg uncertainty
As already described in the chapter The uncertainty
principle, Heisenberg's uncertainty disappears completely if one assumes
that the universe is a cellular automaton.
Not the universe is unsharp, but we have only not understood yet that space and time are discrete. In a space grid a classical movement is not possible, but only a change of the states of basic elements. Therefore, the term "momentum" cannot be used. There are exact locations in the universe, but there is nothing that could have momentum. Of the two fundamental terms of the Heisenberg uncertainty location and momentum, the term momentum is wrong.
Bell's inequality
Bell's inequality: With the disappearance of Heisenberg's uncertainty -
a cornerstone of quantum mechanics - Bell's inequality also disappears and
with it the alleged non-locality. This non-locality is one of the main reasons
why some physicists exclude an explanation of the universe by a cellular
automaton, because a cellular automaton describes the universe by locality
and by "hidden parameters" (basic building blocks) in the sense of Einstein,
Podolski and Rosen.
Equality of elementary particles
The fact that e.g.
all electrons are equal (same mass, same charge and size) is not self-evident,
but must have physical reasons. The Standard Model explains this with the
assumption that there is an electron quantum field in the universe, and
electrons are only excitations of this field and therefore all have the
same basic properties. In the same way, a d-quark quantum field is postulated,
a u-quark quantum field, a Higgs quantum field, a photon quantum field,
and so on.The problem with it is only: The whole set of quantum fields would
have to fill the whole universe at the same time, but up to now nobody has
observed such a quantum field, (that part, which connects for example the
electrons among themselves).
However, if one assumes that the universe is a cellular automaton, then the equality of elementary particles can be explained in a very simple way: Such an automaton consists of a space lattice and therefore also of elementary cells. A photon, for example, consists of two elementary cells, and because the cells are the same size in the whole lattice, therefore photons always have the same size and the same properties in the whole space lattice, and so on.
With this explanation no vast amount of hypothetical quantum fields must be postulated which are not visible, but only it must be assumed that the space is discrete, i.e. is a space lattice. That is all. Note also that this is an explanation that justifies in a physical way why elementary particles are always the same. Quantum field theory, on the other hand, does not provide a deeper explanation to this question.
Space and matter
Today's Standard Model has no explanation
for what space actually is or what it consists of. The space is simply assumed
as a continuum although there is no single experiment which would prove
this assumption. The continuum is considered to consist of points, of which
substance the points should be is unknown. And there is no physical explanation
for the connection between space and matter at all. For example: If matter
flies through space, by what mechanism does matter affect the points in
space? With which mechanism, for example, does a mass access space points
to curve space, as postulated in the theory of relativity? The Standard
Model does not provide an answer to this question.
If the universe is a cellular automaton, then there is a simple explanation for the connection of space and matter: The entire lattice space is formed by the basic elements, and these form the matter at the same time. The following graphic shall clarify the connection in principle:
Here the connection is immediately obvious. Space and matter are no longer isolated from each other. The basic elements form the space and depending on the occupancy with basic elements, things appear in the space for example as vacuum or as elementary particles. Here it is not necessary to simply assume the space as unexplained background, as in the Standard Model.
Mathematical universe
The universe in which we live
is not a chaotic structure, but processes always run in the same way according
to the always same rules. That means, in the universe laws
are active, and these laws are mathematically seen exact up to the 8th place
behind the decimal point (e.g. Maxwell equations).
The laws which work in the nature are mathematically so precise that researchers ask for a long time the question whether the processes in the universe are not produced by an underlying mathematical structure. For a long time it is therefore spoken of the fact that we possibly live in a mathematical universe - this was discussed so far however only as vague possibility. But the evidence is growing: quantum computers use atoms to perform calculations, for example to factorize numbers.
That means: Matter is not only a clump, which flies through the space, but matter - or atoms are intelligent structures, they are calculators, which can be used to make calculations. Basically this is sensational, however, nobody is surprised about it nowadays, because we are used to the fact that nature behaves mathematically.
The fact that atoms can be used directly for calculations is only possible if on elementary level of the universe a mathematical-logical structure with precise laws is effective. I would like to quote here the theoretical phyicist Paola A. Zizzi, who discusses in her writing [1] fundamental aspects of quantum calculations:
"Having assumed that space-time at the Planck scale encodes quantum information, the latter must be processed to give rise, as an output, to the universe as we know it. If so, quantum space-time is not just a quantum memory register of n qubits: it is the whole thing, a quantum memory register plus a network of quantum logic gates. In other words, space-time at the Planck scale must be in such a quantum state to be able to evaluate those discrete functions which are the laws of Physics in their discrete and most fundamental form. We may interpret that quantum state as the state of a quantum computer which is computing Boolean functions."
This corresponds to the image of a computing space which is nothing else than a cellular automaton. It is a mathematical formula in action. And quantum computers plug into the calculations of this automaton.
Note also here, in which simple way a cellular automaton allows to understand, why the universe behaves so mathematically. Today's Standard Model with its mechanistic view of the world and the assumption of space and time as continuum has no explanation at all.
[1] Paola A. Zizzi: Spacetime at the Planck Scale: The Quantum Computer View
Summary
If one sums up all the reasons given above, and also looks at the simple way in which they allow physically illustrative explanations to questions which the present Standard Model is at a loss to answer, everyone should actually come to the conclusion that the universe corresponds to a cellular automaton.
The above reasons fit together seamlessly, no special assumptions had to be made, except for the one, that space is quantized. This assumption alone explains many previously misunderstood and seemingly mysterious phenomena of the quantum world.