A thought I just had that I will probably find out somene has had long ago

Nov 08, 2008 20:49

Posit the following:

a) The universe is a simulation
b) Quantum outcomes are determined according to the probabilities of quantum mechanics and a random number generator.

I'm basically wondering if we could devise an experiment that could show us if the RNG posited by b were a psuedorandom number generator. What would we look for? Evidence of a period, maybe?

If we watched a bit of carbon-14 decay for long enough, maybe the interval between events might eventually repeat itself? (Although, that would probably require one PRNG for whatever chunk of carbon we were watching ... which isn't a very likely implementation of a simulation, and even if things were implemented that way, we'd have to figure out which bits of carbon were all using hte same PRNG, which doesn't sound like something we'd be able to figure out to begin with ...)

Sometimes I wish I knew how to write fiction well - stuff like this might make pretty good S.F. short stories.
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