The Limey

Just another grumpy old software engineer

[The Limey @thelim3y]

My 8 month old #rottweiler gets pwned by my 7 month old kitten

[The Limey @thelim3y]

The delayed choice quantum eraser experiment is one of the strangest results in physics.

You fire particles through a double slit. Whether you observe which slit they go through determines if you get an interference pattern or not. Typical quantum weirdness so far 😆 But here's the twist. You can make that observation AFTER the particle has already hit the screen. And it still changes the result. Your future choice retroactively sorts the past results into interference or non-interference patterns.

John Wheeler proposed the delayed choice thought experiment in the late 1970s. Scully and Drühl extended it into the quantum eraser concept in 1982. Kim et al. ran the actual experiment in 1999 and confirmed it. The retrocausal correlations are there in the data.

Ask a physicist what's actually happening and you'll get an interpretation, not a mechanism. Copenhagen says don't ask. Many worlds says reality split. Pilot wave says there's a hidden guide. None of them tell you WHY. They describe the math. They don't explain the mechanism.

I'm a software developer I've built game engines and rendering systems on and off throughout my career. And when I look at this experiment I don't see a mystery, I see something I've implemented a few times.

A deferred rendering pipeline.

In a deferred rendering pipeline, the final pixel colour isn't committed until all the data it depends on has arrived. The engine doesn't care what order the data comes in. It doesn't care about sequence. It assembles the output from whatever inputs it needs, whenever they're available.

The delayed choice experiment apparently looks like this. The universe doesn't commit to a state until all dependencies are resolved, and dependencies aren't bound by time, they're bound by what information is needed to complete the calculation.

We experience the output as time. But the engine underneath might not be computing in our time direction at all. It might be computing in dependency order. This isn't mysticism, magic, nor Matrix cosplay. It's a direct parallel between how we build computational systems and how the universe appears to behave at the quantum level.

I'm not saying the universe is a simulation. I'm saying the only framework that makes this experiment feel obvious rather than mysterious is a computational one. The simulation hypothesis gets dismissed as pop philosophy. Meanwhile string theory has produced zero testable predictions in 40 years and nobody blinks 🤷‍♂️.

Possibly the people who've actually built simulated worlds have something useful to contribute to this conversation?

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@Cerra__

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@Cerra__ Dexter has a pretty decent one I think :)

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@Cerra__ It says random thoughts at inappropriate hours not inappropriate thoughts at any old hour - just in case y'all cant read 😂

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@SteelyMcPeek https://t.co/v9uJuWO9iv

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@SteelyMcPeek

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@Jasper1977 Don’t be silly I care and I still need you for my brakes so yeah… still caring 😭

[The Limey @thelim3y]

If you're a vibe coder with zero software engineering skills stop posting like you're the fucking Messiah of coding ffs

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@BrittanyQuattl3

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@BrittanyQuattl3

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@IngmarClarysse @r0ktech Don't be! Terrible views and all...

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@GrunionShaftoe @r0ktech It's a lot of grass BUT you get to mow those straight lines 2 times per week it's great for us OCDers :)

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@r0ktech But the mowing... omfg there's a lot of mowing just sayin' (and I still code!)

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@MyBestDyingLife 🌹

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@MyBestDyingLife 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@SteelyMcPeek Ojai CA, Dec 2017

[The Limey @thelim3y]

@nkh12349 Spring - snow vaguely mwelting