The Universe as a Simulation: James Gates, Jr.

This post is about James Sylvester Gates, Jr., who visited our campus earlier this week. Jim, as he likes to be called, is a distinguished string theorist and a popularizer of science, with a bunch of popular science books (see below), and lots of YouTube videos of his talks and interviews (I enjoyed particularly the extensive one with Lex Fridman).

Early Life

Jim is a very interesting character. He is an African-American. But as an army kid, he managed to reach the age of 13 without experiencing segregation, since the US army had integrated in 1948 following President Truman's executive order. Once he stepped out into the civilian world, however, he had 'to learn how to be black'.

As an ironical offshoot of racial policies, he came under the influence of an outstanding physics teacher at the segregated Jones High School in Orlando, Freeman Coney, who in desegregated times would likely have been teaching at a university or working in industry.

Higher Education

His interests motivated by Coney (and Marvel comics, as he showed in his talk), Jim then attended MIT (BS in physics and math) and PhD (Physics; he told me his thesis was based on the work of Nobel prize winner Abdus Salam who later invited Jim to give a talk at the ICTP in Trieste), moving on to a postdoc at CalTech (mentored by Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann, both Nobelists), and then faculty positions at MIT, Brown, Howard and now Maryland. Gates has also worked at the interface of STEM education and science policy, and was honored with a National Medal of Science by President Obama in 2013.

Research

Jim's physics work is highly mathematical and technical. He works in an area of string theory which considers bosons and fermions to be symmetric partners - in lay language this means in the theory the equations for force and matter have the same form. Jim is a pioneer and authority in his field and a co-author of Superspace, or One thousand and one lessons in supersymmetry (1984). A free version can be found here.

The Universe as Simulation

Gates' work has a powerful appeal for lay people. With collaborators, he found he could express the equations of supersymmetry pictorially in terms of diagrams that he called adinkras (after patterns from West Africa which express aphorisms or concepts). These diagrams are beautiful and fascinating by themselves.

However, using them Gates further figured out that the equations of supersymmetry (which attempt to describe the cosmos at its most fundamental level) contain error-correction codes, of the same type as invented by Hamming and others and which are routinely used in our browsers, etc.

These codes ensure that our messages do not turn into gibberish due to the imperfect nature of our computers, transmission wires, etc. Therefore finding them built into the fundamental equations of the cosmos implies suggestively that the universe is a simulation [although the error-correction is clearly not working in my case -:)] as implied in the popular movie the Matrix. Here is an accessible popular article by Jim about this work.

Conclusion

Added to my reading queue, the popular science books written by Gates:

[1] Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality

[2] Reality in the Shadows

[3] Proving Einstein Right