The Grand Unified Theory and its discovery
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Actually, the Grand Unified Theory is quite easy to work out if you do a Euclid, but with a supercomputer. Although determinism is out of fashion now, I am still one of its main supporters, and I believe that indeterminacy is just a subset of determinism.
To work out the GUT, and the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, all we need is a powerful computer with the ability to extrapolate, and the statement 1+1=2. In fact, Douglas Adams wasn't far off when he suggested that the entire universe could be extrapolated from a piece of muffin; he just wasn't adventurous enough.
Armed with the knowledge of 1+1=2, the computer (call it Deeper Thought for nostalgia's sake) could, like Euclid, calculate all of the mathematical laws known to man, and some others as well. Of course, maths is the language of nature (observe the Fibbonacci sequence in plant petal growth) so knowing the vocabulary is the start to understanding the universe.
Everyone knows that the entire universe is the way it is because of six universal constants (read the book 'Just Six Numbers'), and of course these numbers were inevitable (consider the goldfish bowl theorem of an intelligent goldfish wondering why its universe is made of water), so Deeper Thought could exptrapolate them at will. From these numbers, the computer could extrapolate from the Big Bang forward in time, replaying all of our history, and even those of alien worlds, if they exist, right down to the present day. It could tell us what really happened to Jesus, if Elvis was kidnapped by aliens, what [insert enemy country] was doing with its troops, and could even settle legal cases for us. (Of course, it would require unprecedented amounts of RAM -- just think how many quarks there are in the universe...by the way, is anyone willing to offer funding for it?)
It wouldn't stop there. It would go on extrapolating the future. This is where the problems start. What happens if it predicts that the Pope (for example) is going to be assassinated? Would we be able to stop it from happening, or would the computer have predicted our attempt to stop the assassination? Some say that it would be inevitable, others that it could be changed owing to indeterminacy, but more pessimistically and more worryingly, some people claim that it could actually damage the structure of the universe. Whole branches of history could just disappear, no-one being aware that there had been any change made, just this computer, confidently predicting events, not just fiddling while Rome burns, but holding the matches.
Of course, this wouldn't stop the inventors: these fears would be dismissed as the ramblings of science-fiction fans with too much time on their hands. Computer engineers and physicists alike would lie about the probabilities of Spontaneous Universal Non-existence (SUN). They would justify it to themselves as "one of the risks we have to take". The project would undoubtedly be classified by the American military, and people would laugh at the idea on the X-Files.
And after all this, with whole branches of time disappearing left, right, and centre, the computer itself will suffer Backwards Existence Revocation -- its very license to exist will be removed by the universe, but it would be too late. The entire human race, along with our planet and our cosmos, would be sparked out of existence like someone out of Orwell's 1984, and then the spark itself would disappear. And through it all, the computer would experience BER just five minutes before the answer, and it would sit there spelt out in quantum fluctuations, the thing which so many have sought but the very seeking of which has caused such incomprehensibly immense tragedy as this, the answer so deceptive in its simplicity: forty-two.
To work out the GUT, and the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, all we need is a powerful computer with the ability to extrapolate, and the statement 1+1=2. In fact, Douglas Adams wasn't far off when he suggested that the entire universe could be extrapolated from a piece of muffin; he just wasn't adventurous enough.
Armed with the knowledge of 1+1=2, the computer (call it Deeper Thought for nostalgia's sake) could, like Euclid, calculate all of the mathematical laws known to man, and some others as well. Of course, maths is the language of nature (observe the Fibbonacci sequence in plant petal growth) so knowing the vocabulary is the start to understanding the universe.
Everyone knows that the entire universe is the way it is because of six universal constants (read the book 'Just Six Numbers'), and of course these numbers were inevitable (consider the goldfish bowl theorem of an intelligent goldfish wondering why its universe is made of water), so Deeper Thought could exptrapolate them at will. From these numbers, the computer could extrapolate from the Big Bang forward in time, replaying all of our history, and even those of alien worlds, if they exist, right down to the present day. It could tell us what really happened to Jesus, if Elvis was kidnapped by aliens, what [insert enemy country] was doing with its troops, and could even settle legal cases for us. (Of course, it would require unprecedented amounts of RAM -- just think how many quarks there are in the universe...by the way, is anyone willing to offer funding for it?)
It wouldn't stop there. It would go on extrapolating the future. This is where the problems start. What happens if it predicts that the Pope (for example) is going to be assassinated? Would we be able to stop it from happening, or would the computer have predicted our attempt to stop the assassination? Some say that it would be inevitable, others that it could be changed owing to indeterminacy, but more pessimistically and more worryingly, some people claim that it could actually damage the structure of the universe. Whole branches of history could just disappear, no-one being aware that there had been any change made, just this computer, confidently predicting events, not just fiddling while Rome burns, but holding the matches.
Of course, this wouldn't stop the inventors: these fears would be dismissed as the ramblings of science-fiction fans with too much time on their hands. Computer engineers and physicists alike would lie about the probabilities of Spontaneous Universal Non-existence (SUN). They would justify it to themselves as "one of the risks we have to take". The project would undoubtedly be classified by the American military, and people would laugh at the idea on the X-Files.
And after all this, with whole branches of time disappearing left, right, and centre, the computer itself will suffer Backwards Existence Revocation -- its very license to exist will be removed by the universe, but it would be too late. The entire human race, along with our planet and our cosmos, would be sparked out of existence like someone out of Orwell's 1984, and then the spark itself would disappear. And through it all, the computer would experience BER just five minutes before the answer, and it would sit there spelt out in quantum fluctuations, the thing which so many have sought but the very seeking of which has caused such incomprehensibly immense tragedy as this, the answer so deceptive in its simplicity: forty-two.
