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Beta Decay

When exactly will a particular neutron decay into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino? Is the moment of its death correlated with other events in our universe? Conventional wisdom rejects this idea and suggests that beta decay is a source of true randomness. According to S, however, this cannot be the case. Never-ending true randomness is neither formally describable (Def. 2.5) nor S-describable (Def. 6.1); its computation would not be possible using countable computational steps.

This encourages a re-examination of beta decay or other types of particle decay: given S, a very simple and fast but maybe not quite trivial PRG should be responsible for the decay pattern of possibly widely separated neutrons. (If the PRG were too trivial and too obvious then maybe the resulting universe would be too simple to permit evolution of our type of consciousness, thus being ruled out by the weak anthropic principle.) Perhaps the main reason for the current absence of empirical evidence in this vein is that nobody has systematically looked for it yet.



Juergen Schmidhuber
2001-01-09


Related links: In the beginning was the code! - Zuse's thesis - Life, the universe, and everything - Generalized Algorithmic Information - Speed Prior - The New AI