Events 2

I read a transcript of a science explainer by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder about physicist David Deutsch's "Constructor Theory", which I had not heard of before, and how it accounts for time.

It sounds like just the 180º opposite of what I've been talking about: creating a model of physics that seems more like the kind of real-time systems I work on as a basis for reality. The shortest time period (Planck Time?) is the recycle time of a kind of null task, a term right out of Real-Time Operating Systems. That's basically how I think of the world around me - based solely on decades of professional experience - but it seems weird to think of it as a legitimate Theory of Everything.

Down deep, real-time computer systems - with their asynchronous, concurrent, and parallel behavior - are a lot more non-deterministic than people might think. It's one of the reasons that it's hard to debug such systems - a bug might only reveal itself under certain timing or certain order of events. Determinism is a kind of emergent property created by engineers who are hiding the details under the hood from the user - kind of like Newtonian physics layered on top of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Once you become accustomed to architecting, implementing, and debugging such systems, it's easy - it was for me, anyway - to start seeing the entire world through the same lens. Maybe I should not be surprised that there's one candidate for a Theory of Everything that takes this viewpoint.