Hold on all you Matrix fans – you may not be living in a computer, but it’s possible that those binary systems could also be describing the world you live in.
Hold on all you Matrix fans – you may not be living in a computer, but it’s possible that those binary systems could also be describing the world you live in.
Physicist James Gates explained that super symmetry predicts there have to be other forms of matter and energy for the universe to function in the way it does.
He gave the Brian Wilmot lecture, “Symmetry and the Quincunx Nexus”, at the opening of Scifest Africa Thursday.
Gates enthralled a packed Guy Butler Theatre with a mind-blowing lecture about, mysterious, unseen parts of the universe called super strings that took the audience members closer to answering fundamental questions: “Who am I…and what’s going on around me.”
What are we made of? What constitutes matter? These are uncertainties that lead to the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, which explains why particles acquire mass. As pattern seekers, scientists try to establish a balance, or symmetry, in the way force carriers are created.
Why is it that the universe creates perfect photons, but other force carriers vary dramatically?
When scientists look at them, Gates, said, some look like they “need to go on a diet”.
One of Gates’ impressive contributions is the “odd” discovery of computer code imbedded in our reality. Graphical representations of these equations called Adinkas, hold binary strings of bits, sets of ones and zeros, that are similar to those found in drive search engines and browsers.
If code is just a set of instructions given to a processor, what kind of instructions are we talking about here?
Answer: the type that corrects errors. But his theory could end up on the rubbish heap of history, he acknowledged.
“This is always why you shouldn’t quite trust scientists,” he joked, “because we’ll tell you a beautiful story, but unless we have an experimental observation to back the story up, you should keep your fingers crossed.”
Gates, who is from the University of Maryland in the US, maintains that mathematics is an essential storytelling tool.
“In my country people bring out the holy water and start throwing it at you,” he joked.
But without it, his research would not be possible, as it tries to express elementary workings of nature through sets of mathematical equations.
Does this mean we live in a simulated, virtual reality? And if so, the obvious follow-up would be: who wrote the code?
Now, wait just a minute all you Matrix fans! “Maybe in the instance after the big bang, in order to ensure the stability of the structure of our reality, there was something like error correction codes at work and maybe we’re seeing the remnants of that,” he concluded.
He cited DNA as an example of error correction in nature. This is a new development in science.
Gates, who serves on President Barack Obama’s council of advisers on Science and Technology, has spent his life postulating this theory.
He encouraged students, saying they too are capable of composing never-thought-of-before ideas.
