cosmic rays offer clue our universe could be a computer simulation

I have often twisted my brain trying to model the fractal of, a simulation, running a simulation, running a simulation, running a simulation...and so on. Each level is "mostly" undetectable by the other levels. You have occasional spillover's in the forms of: quantum experiments, paranormals, UFO's, deja vu...ect. It's a similar idea or related to the quantum theory, where every possible scenario plays out, and we are only aware of one of them at a time. Time is a relationship between events of each level. Who's the admin though? Is there one for each level? My brain hurts.

reply to post by Wongbeedman


I find this article a bit confusing on many levels. Scientists claim that they were able to identify the borders of the universe through mathematical factors which match the chessboard. I am intrigued on how they were able to detect the borders but unfortunately, their explanation is pretty void as they cannot back it up with evidence. I do agree on some of what they said regarding the rays; let's say the rays run in an endless universe, that means that the rays should never lose energy and therefore keep going non-stop; let's say the rays stop at some point in which it has to be reflected and therefore lose all of its energy as it goes back to where it came from, but this time it will not reach the point of start because it has lost all of its energy. Scientists have not offered not one evidence to claim that rays lose energy in the first place; and they even admitted that they don't even know what they are looking at in the first place. They are giving us information with zero back up as usual! These scientists are losing it badly! So, now they tell us something and they don't know what they're showing us! what is the point? it doesn't take a scientist to figure out whether we live in an endless universe or not but these mad scientists are not able to seriously think as they keep going back and forth on their claims in which they have zero evidence to support it at all.

reply to post by BristolStew


What I would like to know is, if the vacuum of space is in fact not empty, but full of fields and particles and atoms and dust and debris.. how the rays you speak of wouldnt lose energy by colliding with these... also how the cosmological constant..dark energy and dark matter effect rays?

So the article was in general quite typically a theory paper and so pretty difficult to understand in comparison to an experimental physics paper. Regardless, they come to the conclusion that the GZK cut-off tells us that the universe is a simulation.

But what is interesting is that they start with the assumption and fit it to the data, then say yes look it works. It is kind of different to taking some lower order things and then predicting the GZK cut-off

The GZK cut off itself is not an unknown, it is predicted that when a proton is accelerated up to about 1x(19-20) eV the protons can interact with the CMB, reducing in energy by forming an excited state delta which decays to produce a high energy proton and a pion.

All it suggests is that sources of such high energy cosmic rays can not exist locally if our understanding of interaction cross sections is correct. (it might not be) There are also some interesting things that make such calculations difficult to do if we consider that not all primary cosmic rays are protons, but also heavier ions too... allowing the GZK cut off to be somewhat softer than a direct slice.

Eitherway, interesting paper but i dont think it really gives any evidence so to speak

reply to post by ErosA433


so they believed that because the proton couldn't reach ever increasing energies, the universe is a computer simulation? ( I understand I maybe interpreting that wrong) but if that is the case, couldn't they have made that same argument for the cut-off speed of light?

reply to post by ImaFungi


Well the paper itself bounces around several things and finally talks a little about the GKZ cut off as evidence, but essentially i think your interpretation is right. You could almost think of it as for example being a computational limit, say...the largest 64 bit floating point number being 1.7976931348623157e+308 (pulled from wiki) for example. It is a bit of a stretch though to call it evidence given that current theory (if extrapolations are correct, they may not be ofcourse) explains what could be the cause of the GKZ, It also says that ultra high energy cosmics should be largely directional pointing approximately back to the source.

I am not sure if this has been shown.

Still it is quite an interesting concept as i said, though I am not totally convinced.