Can the State of the Universe be Stored in a Computer?
This article is a follow-up to my essay "The Universe as Automaton", which I published in WIN ONE, issue 11, from 2013. There, I developed the idea that the state of the universe might be modeled as a three-dimensional matrix and that the entire history of the universe could be represented as a state machine (automaton). In this article I also wrote: "It is not possible to have something that is as large as the entire universe represented by a computer - except, maybe, if it has enough redundancy that a suitable data compression algorithm could be applied." This is what I would like to investigate further now. Can a state of the universe be stored on a computer harddrive? What obstacles are connected with this endeavour? As a computer is part of the universe, it is obvious that the state of the universe can be stored on its harddrive only if we use some sort of encoding that acts as a data compressor. After all, the file that stores the state of the universe must