Quote:Both firmly rooted in this reality. Again it shouldn't really surprise us that our sims have things in common (or appear to have things in common) with the reality in which they were created, leveraging the principles of that reality.
So, classical physics (prior to the 21st century) is generally characterized by the principle of complete determinism and includes newton's laws of motion, classical Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalisms, classical electrodynamics (Maxwell's Equations), and classical thermodynamics. In contrast to classical physics, "modern physics" is a slightly looser term which may refer to just quantum physics or to 20th and 21st century physics in general. Modern physics includes quantum theory and relativity, when applicable.
Although to some extent we formed opinion of how reality works by classical physics, the idea of a reality that seems to abide by some of the principles of computer science (think 1s and 0s), it seems, is a relatively new one.
Additionally, "a decisive refutation of any claim that our reality is computer-simulated would be the discovery of some uncomputable physics, because if reality is doing something that no computer can do, it cannot be a computer simulation. (Computability generally means computability by a Turing machine. Hypercomputation (super-Turing computation) introduces other possibilities which will be dealt with separately.) In fact, known physics is held to be (Turing) computable, but the statement "physics is computable" needs to be qualified in various ways. Before symbolic computation, a number, thinking particularly of a real number, one with an infinite number of digits, was said to be computable if a Turing machine will continue to spit out digits endlessly, never reaching a "final digit". This runs counter, however, to the idea of simulating physics in real time (or any plausible kind of time). Known physical laws (including those of quantum mechanics) are very much infused with real numbers and continua, and the universe seems to be able to decide their values on a moment-by-moment basis."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality
