He points to the fact that 40 years of efforts to simulate the Standard Model on a computer have so far failed. ‘To perform such a simulation, one must first take equations expressed in terms of continuous quantities and find a discrete formulation that is compatible with the bits of information in which computers trade … It remains one of the most important, yet rarely mentioned, open problems in theoretical physics’.86 This suggests not necessarily that the simulation could never be made, but more fascinatingly, that even if it could, it would involve translating the inherently continuous
...more