Gravity

Although it is sometimes described as the weak force by physicists, gravity may be evidence of a very different force in the universe. An arguably radical theory advanced by Dr. Melvin Vopson, suggests that gravity acts like a sophisticated software program that compresses matter, reducing the vastness of the galaxies to a manageable data point. Ok, on the surface that sounds a bit, well, wacky, but allow me to go on for a bit and explore this concept. Compression of information surrounds us--it is the essential means by which the digital environment operates. You see, when we digitize information, convert it to ones and zeroes from its analog state, we actually increase the volume of information by orders of magnitude. That seems counter intuitive. How then can digital information be so much more efficient and conformable than analog reality?

The answer is that once converted to a binary form, digital data is compressed. That is how we are able to stream images, put our favorite playlists on a a matchbook sized device, reduce the world's information to tiny digital packets we can cast through the airwaves. Compression is the process of organizing and throwing away all the emptiness and unessential information between those remaining bits that actually contain meaning. We use various methods to do this--interpolating the missing data when we reconvert it to analog form, inferring, computing or manipulating the digits.

If all that seems a bit hard to comprehend for those who do not dabble in the world of physics, let me offer an analogy by way of example. Have you ever looked at an impressionist painting, or perhaps you yourself did a paint by numbers picture as a child? Observed from a distance such paintings convey a coherent and often rich impression of a scene, but when one focuses closely, the image becomes blobs or splashes, points, or dots of color that seem almost random. Now imagine we could use sophisticated math to eliminate all the empty space between those splashes of color--reducing the amount of information the picture contains. And once we have done that, let's imagine we could eliminate every red dot that is adjacent to a blue one knowing that at a later point when we wanted to reconstruct our painting we could reverse that process. Do that for every combination of colors and just keep a list of those combinations and instructions by which to reassemble the picture and you will have greatly reduced the total to a far smaller sum.

That is in very simple terms, compression. Now, how does that apply to gravity?

If we regard the universe as akin to that impressionist painting with the stars and planets--all matter-- representing the dots and splashes of color, we can visualize the steps. First eliminate the empty information--the vastness of space in and between the matter. Then, apply the power of computation to manage the relationships in space between what remains. Gravity is the force that pulls this matter/information together--even though it is indeed weak by comparison to the electromagnetic or nuclear forces which bind the elements. And by organizing and reducing the complexity of celestial matter, gravity applies a computational efficiency that according to Vopson's theory reduces disorder--or what physicists call entropy--over time rather than increasing it as is the case in the physical realm.

You might ask--is this just theoretical physics and therefore of little relevance to our everyday lives? And you would be right in saying that the obvious connection to reality as we believe it to exist is hard to discern. But if Vopson is correct, it begins to explain not only the least understood force in the universe, gravity, but suggests that the laws which govern the universe may follow the very same patterns that we have discovered as technology progresses towards the merger of machine and human. No, machines do not think, at least not yet and perhaps never, however much it may appear they do so, but in like manner we may discover that what we thought about the nature of the universe is in the same way not what it appears, but an intentionally created program. And while that may seem to suggest a collision between science and religion, we must beg the question, who or what created that program?

It is a tantalizing thought, one that bridges two very different views but which can be encompassed by both. Is our creator an engineer, are we living in a simulation, or has Vopson seen a glimpse of the order in apparent chaos--the nearly invisible hand that structured all that is and perhaps all that will ever be?