As you’ll know from Episode 8: Where’s the computer that runs the universe? ( read ⋅ listen ⋅ watch ), I have my doubts about the existence of a computer that’s whirring away, applying Wolfram’s rules to Wolfram’s graphs, performing the computations required to run our universe.

This computer, if it exists, is necessarily invisible to us, and as I warned in Episode 12: Beware invisible things ( read ⋅ listen ⋅ watch ) we should be wary of what we can’t see.

Still, I want to revisit this idea of a computer that runs the universe.

I want to come at it from a slightly different direction.

Rather than adopt the stance of the monkey with its hands over its eyes and insist that if I can’t see it, it’s not there, let’s suppose that there is a computer that runs the universe and ask a simple question:

How big would it have to be?

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Other episodes I mention:

• Episode 8: Where’s the computer that runs the universe? – read ⋅ listen ⋅ watch
• Episode 12: Beware invisible things – read ⋅ listen ⋅ watch
• Episode 15: Where to apply Wolfram’s rules? – read ⋅ listen ⋅ watch