Eugine_Nier comments on Can somebody explain this to me?: The computability of the laws of physics and hypercomputation - Less Wrong

12 Post author: ChrisHallquist 21 April 2013 09:22PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (53)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 23 April 2013 02:54:53AM 1 point [-]

There are spacetime models in general relativity (i.e. solutions to the Einstein equations) that permit hypercomputation. In a Malament-Hogarth spacetime, there are wordlines such that an object traveling along the worldline will experience infinite time, but for an observer at some point p outside the wordline, the time it takes for the object to traverse the worldline is finite, and the wordline is entirely within p's causal past. So if you had a Turing machine traveling along this wordline, it could send a signal to p if and onliy if it halted, and the observer at p is guaranteed to receive the signal if the machine ever halts.

Don't you have the problem of the signal getting blue-shifted out of the range of your detector?

Comment author: pragmatist 23 April 2013 05:32:03AM *  0 points [-]

Not necessarily. For an example of an M-H setup without divergent blueshift see the paper I linked at the end of this comment.