arXiv:1312.4456quant-ph
Uncomputability and physical law
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Abstract
This article addresses the question of when physical laws and their consequences can be computed. If a physical system is capable of universal computation, then its energy gap can't be computed. At an even more fundamental level, the most concise, simply applicable formulation of the underlying laws of physics is uncomputable. That is, physicists are in the same boat as mathematicians: many quantities of interest can be computed, but not all.
"A simplified but useful picture of the goal of scientific research is that scientists obtain large amounts of data about the world via observation and experiment, and then try to find regularities and patterns in that data. But a regularity or pattern is nothing more or less…
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