In 2008, the first quantum encrypted message was sent.  It was announced that it was unbreakable.

In the strange world of quantum physics, nothing actually exists until it is observed.  Everything is merely a probability of existing.  That probability is often called a probability wave.  Electrons aren’t discreet objects rotating around a nucleas (unless you take a peek somehow).  They are a swarm of wavelike probabilities.  An electron might have a 37% chance of being at one place in an orbit or a 21% chance of being in another place.  Those probabilities are calculated based on surrounding observations that make one thing more likely than another.

The electron (and everything else in existence) only becomes in exactly one place at exactly one time when a human being uses something to measure it.  The so-called probability wave then collapses and the location and existence of that object becomes a probability of 100% and all other possible locations collapse to 0% odds.

I know it sounds strange.  Even Einstein didn’t like the idea.  He totally rejected quantum theory, but since then we have exploited it so much and performed so many experiments proving quantum theory that we can no longer reject the reality that reality itself is very, very bizarre.

Things simply don’t exist until someone looks at them.  Of course, existence is consistent so if you look at something that someone else has previously looked at (and their information can get to you in any possible way), then you’ll see the same thing they saw… or something that is explainable by normal laws of physics.

Scientists simply refuse to explore the obvious implications of this discovery.  This discovery obviously means that we are special in some way.  The universe is made for us.  It changes from a blur of possibilities into reality only when we look at it.

If the universe is made for us, then there must be a maker.  That is always a disturbing thought to many scientists.

It also means that the universe is rather artificial.  It is like a holodeck.  Everything is an illusion that is created at the very moment we look at it.  At that moment, it becomes reality in every normal sense of the word, but we have discovered the secret that it didn’t exist the moment before we looked at it (unless someone else had already made an observation of it or something else that forced it’s probability to be 100%).

Even more bizarre is that the maker theoretically could have made it impossible to see probability waves and therefore could have kept us in the dark about the secret that the universe is just a holodeck.  The creator didn’t do that though.

That makes one wonder why.  Those into computers in the year 2008 had more of a clue of why than the average populace.  Of course most people in the year 2008 didn’t even know about quantum physics nor any of the previously mentioned odd things that it revealed about us, our creator and the universe.

But some did.  Those that did thought about how they would create the illusion of reality in a way that matches the way the universe actually works.  Being computer people (mostly programmers), they thought in terms of computers.

The universe is made up of quadrillions of things.  All of those things (quarks or whatever you want to call the most basic an tiny particles that make up the universe) all have a location and that location changes over time (ie: they are moving and therefore have a trajectory).

Those things also interact with each other.  We call that interaction “forces” in the world of physics.  In 2008, they still hadn’t joined the weak force, the strong force, gravity and magnetism, but they strongly understood that they were really all manifestations of one kind of force just as they understood that all kinds of particles whether they be baseballs or electrons were really made up of one kind of particle that was extremely small.

Programmers realized that the universe would take up an extreme amount of memory.  In fact, it would use up everything in the superuniverse that it was created in to store that amount of data.

Think of it this way.  If you wanted to create a universe with the infinite complexity of our own universe within a computer model, you would have to store the location and trajectory of every particle in the universe somewhere.  We call those “bits” in the world of computer programming.  A bit is the smallest possible piece of information.

You can think of it as how you learned to count.  You may have used your fingers to learn to count to ten.  Each finger was a bit.  It was either up or down.  It represented a single bit of information.

The problem with trying to contain a model of this entire universe in some kind of computer memory is really the same problem you had trying to count past 10 when you ran out of fingers.  You see… you could used coins or anything else to represent those bits of information.  You could have placed coins heads up to represent one finger up and heads down to represent one finger down.  There are quadrillions of objects in the universe that you can place into one position or another to represent things so you could represent the binary state of quadrillions of objects.

The problem is when you try to represent the entire universe.  The entire universe takes an entire universe of objects to represent.

But computer programmers have had to deal with limited memory storage systems since the very beginning.  Actually they had to deal with limited storage even more in the beginning of computer science than they do today.  They have come up with all kinds of ways to compress data.

When a computer programmer who also knew about physics thought about the problem of how to simulate a universe in a computer the same way our universe is simulated, they came up with the obvious answer right away.

In the early days of computers we wrote flight simulators.  Storing all of the possible variations of a flight were impossible in the limited storage systems we had at the time.  Instead, it was done on the fly.  The entire flight couldn’t be known until the pilot actually started to move the controls of the simulated plane.  The simulation was calculated in real-time.

The secret to being able to do that in a limited amount of memory was that the program was written for the pilot.  It only had to simulate what the pilot would see.  It didn’t have to simulate anything outside the view of the pilot.  That makes quadrillions of pieces of information reduce down to just a few thousand pixels on a computer screen.

Those computer programmers obviously noticed what the creator had been up against when the creator made this simulated universe that we live in even though quantum scientists who weren’t computer programmers never talked about the creator much less the problems the creator must have tacked to create this simulated universe.

What they noticed was the explanation for why we can even detect that the universe is simulated.  The creator’s program (or whatever it is) only stores probabilities for everything in existence until the moment that a human (the pilot in the flight simulator example) actuall looks at something.

So a vast majority of the universe is just probabilities.  Those take very little memory to store verses trying to store the exact location and trajectory of every single infinitely small particle in the entire universe.

That’s why we are even able to discover the secret of quantum physics.

In fact, that is how we discovered it at all.

It is the infamous wave/particle duality experiment.  Someone set up a piece of paper with two slits cut into it and a piece of photographic paper behind it.  Then from the front, they fired individual protons in rapid succession at the piece of paper.

It made a pattern that made it look like light must be a wave.  The pattern was an interference patter that looked just like what you would expect if waves of water went through those two slits and then spread out and ended up touched each other and making that wave interference pattern that we’ve all seen.

If you don’t know what i’m talking about, go fill a bowl with water and let it get still.  Then drop a tiny pebble into it and watch the waves spread out from the point the pebble hit the water.  Now drop two pebbles in and watch what happens when waves touch each other.  We call that a wave interference pattern.  That’s what showed up on the photographic piece of paper.

That confused scientists.  That meant the entire universe was made up of waves, not tiny little particles which is what made sense to everyone.  Don’t be confused yourself.  Remember that this universe is a simulation.  Those waves simply represented possibilities.  We now know call them “probability waves.”  They aren’t actually waves of light.  It’s just that we aren’t looking at every individual particle so the computer running this universe doesn’t have to resolve which slit each particle went though.  Those particles don’t have to exist yet before nobody has looked directly at them so they just exist as probabilities and the wave pattern on the photographic plate shows the probabilities that each particle passed through each slit (or was completely blocked by the paper).

I know.  It still sounds bizarre, but that is what we found out.  Here’s how we found it out.

Scientists really didn’t like the idea that the universe wasn’t made of particles so they got better and better instrumentation and better ways of controlling how much light was being sent toward the paper with two slits.

In fact, they eventually came up with detectors that could detect a single photon and light projectors that could emit a single photon.

How is that possible if there is no such thing as photons?  If they are only waves and not discreet particles.  Well… it’s not; is it?

But scientists did that.  Then they put a detector on one of the slits and fired a single photon.  They could “see” that it went through the left slit and landed on the photographic paper exactly behind the left slit.  They did that over and over.  Each photon went through either the left slit or the right slit.  The wave interference pattern didn’t exist on the photographic piece of paper.  Only two slits of light proving that light was made out of particles.

Of course that was impossible.  How could light be particles and waves?

Even more disturbing was that the experimental results changed just because individual photons were being observed.  The existence of those detectors shouldn’t have changed the results on the photographic plate.  Yet they did!

Lots of other experiments were performed.  The beam of light was shown very fast, but each photon was detected as it went through one slit or the other.  The wave pattern didn’t exist.  They then left the detectors there, but didn’t record the results and the wave pattern was back.

Huh?

Then they recorded the results and held those results for a few days and looked at the photographic plate first.  No wave pattern.

Then they recorded the results and held them for a few days and then destroyed the results without looking at them and then looked at the photographic plate.  The wave pattern was back.

The very act of observing the experiment changed the results.

There is only one explanation, but scientists still don’t articulate it very much.  The explanation is that the wave pattern is a pattern of probabilities.  Those photons don’t exist as discreet things until we look at them.  Then those probability waves collapse into a 100% probability for each of those photons that they went through either the left slot or the right slot.

Although scientists dared never to talk of a creator, the fact the the universe is a vast simulation or the fact that they found a bug in the computer program running the universe, they do talk about how to make use of this interesting bug.

One of the most interesting uses was quantum crytography.  That is the ability to send encrypted messages in a way that is absolutely impossible to eavesdrop on without being detected.  That was first accomplished in the year 2008.

-James Brausch

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