Calculating Space

Calculating Space is the title of MIT's English translation of Konrad Zuse's 1969 book Rechnender Raum (literally: "space that is computing"), the first book on digital physics. Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed by some sort of cellular automaton or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out (among other things) that the classical notions of entropy and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes. Bell's theorem is sometimes thought to contradict Zuse's hypothesis, but it is not applicable to deterministic universes, as Bell himself...