How Simulating the Universe Could Yield Quantum Mechanics
Let’s imagine the universe is being simulated. Based on what we know about physics, what can we say about how the simulation would be implemented? Well, it would probably have:
We can determine whether these are reasonable assumptions by checking that they hold true for existing state-of-the-art physics simulations. It turns out that they hold true for the best oceanography, meteorology, plasma, cosmology, and computational fluid dynamics models. So, having laid out some basic assumptions about how our simulation would be implemented, let’s look at their implications.
The first thing to see is that assumptions 1 and 2 are in tension with one another. In order to ensure that a quantity (eg mass-energy) is conserved, you need to sum that quantity across the entire simulation, determine whether a correction is needed, and then apply that correction to the system as a whole. Computationally, this requires a synchronous reduction operation and an element-wise divide at virtually every timestep.
When you write a single-threaded physics simulation, this can account for about half of the computational cost (these fluid and topology simulations are good examples). As you parallelize your simulation more and more, you can expect the cost of enforcing conservation laws to grow higher in proportion. This is because simulating dynamics is pretty easy to do in parallel. But enforcing system-wide conservation laws requires transferring data between distant CPU cores and keeping them more or less in sync. As a result, enforcing conservation laws in this manner quickly grows to be a limiting factor on runtime. We find ourselves asking: is there a more parallelizable approach to enforcing global conservation laws?
