… On a slightly random note, this reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem’s Hemn space, and the idea of a universe as a particular path through configuration space.
Anyway. There’s a flaw in your gedankenexperiment, when you stop time across every galaxy, and I’m wondering if you have a response. Namely, relativity—in particular, simultaneity.
Essentially: When you “stop time,” you’re saying: “From my perspective, everything simultaneous to me remains so; if I were to assign to myself a “simulation step function”, I could step forward without noting any change in my surroundings.”
(This is not rigorous, because my understanding of GR is not rigorous; nevertheless, I think I have enough of a conceptual understanding to use it in this manner.)
(Also because you can’t stop time.)
Anyway. This has a flaw, in that any moving object will see other objects rotated through spacetime; “stopping time” relative to that moving object will result in a universe that evolves relative to a stationary object (relative to some lab frame.) So you can’t actually stop time across the entire universe; bits of the universe will just suddenly hang still. If the universe is running on a computer somewhere, you could tell it to not move to the next step, but I’m not at all sure what that would do.
I’m not sure how critical this is to the core argument, but you might at least want to change the thought experiment.
(On a side note—I made a Minkowsky diagram while thinking this through, so have a look if you want.)
(On an extra side note—I notice that most of the new replies have been added to the bottom of this list, but mine has been added to the top. A), is this something I should be doing, and B), how do I determine where my posts go?)
Restating, now that I’ve written all that out and my mind is clearer: the fundamental problem is that there’s no absolute time to stop. Your galaxies wouldn’t stop rotating, they’d spin apart about whatever point you decided to take your volume of simultaneity from.
… On a slightly random note, this reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem’s Hemn space, and the idea of a universe as a particular path through configuration space.
Anyway. There’s a flaw in your gedankenexperiment, when you stop time across every galaxy, and I’m wondering if you have a response. Namely, relativity—in particular, simultaneity.
Essentially: When you “stop time,” you’re saying: “From my perspective, everything simultaneous to me remains so; if I were to assign to myself a “simulation step function”, I could step forward without noting any change in my surroundings.”
(This is not rigorous, because my understanding of GR is not rigorous; nevertheless, I think I have enough of a conceptual understanding to use it in this manner.)
(Also because you can’t stop time.)
Anyway. This has a flaw, in that any moving object will see other objects rotated through spacetime; “stopping time” relative to that moving object will result in a universe that evolves relative to a stationary object (relative to some lab frame.) So you can’t actually stop time across the entire universe; bits of the universe will just suddenly hang still. If the universe is running on a computer somewhere, you could tell it to not move to the next step, but I’m not at all sure what that would do.
I’m not sure how critical this is to the core argument, but you might at least want to change the thought experiment.
(On a side note—I made a Minkowsky diagram while thinking this through, so have a look if you want.)
(On an extra side note—I notice that most of the new replies have been added to the bottom of this list, but mine has been added to the top. A), is this something I should be doing, and B), how do I determine where my posts go?)
Restating, now that I’ve written all that out and my mind is clearer: the fundamental problem is that there’s no absolute time to stop. Your galaxies wouldn’t stop rotating, they’d spin apart about whatever point you decided to take your volume of simultaneity from.