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jjaredsimpson | 5 years ago

>If physics ranges over the reals

I thought this was ruled out by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound

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gnramires|5 years ago

That's my understanding as well. Quantum states encode finite information (despite their dynamics lying on the reals; the practical consequence is just that state transitions and information flow are smooth).

The formal discussion around this is largely centered on the Church-Turing thesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

Essentially stating (in a certain interpretation) that any physical process can be simulated by a Turing machine (with no mention of efficiency). This seems to be the case, although I'm not sure we have a convincing proof from quantum field theory yet (note that quantum process can be simulated in classical Turing machines, although with an exponential cost).