"Grows up" being a relative term, here.

Remember those heady head-shop days when you'd get together with your college buddies over the six foot bong they'd made in glass-blowing class or a seltzer gun loaded up with nitrous oxide? Of course you don't, for obvious reasons. But here's a reminder of the kind of thing you talked about when you were stoned out of your mind:

You: Dude, I'm wasted.

Your Roommate: Me too.

That Guy Who Showed Up Who You Only Vaguely Know From Glass-Blowing Class: Hey, what if we're all just little computer programs in a massive computer, and none of this is real?

You: Trippy.

Your Roommate: Like Tron.

[Some of us went to college before the Matrix movies came out.]

You: Dude, I could totally go for some Twinkies.

So what happened to all those discussions about living in a giant computer simulation?

Well, first off, they were popularized, philosophized, desensitized and essentially neutralized by The Matrix and its plodding and pointless sequels. No longer would the Life-As-Computer-Simulation discussion be the, er, unique and private ramblings of every bong circle at every university in Western civilization. Now it was just another meme making its way through the minds of such sober people as judges, accountants, housewives, and George W. Bush. Well, no, strike that last one.

Skip forward seven years, and journalist cum science popularizer Charles Seife is taking the whole idea much more seriously. We've read Seife's Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, which discussed the history of zero, as a number, as a concept, and as a physical entity (or the lack thereof). In spite of Seife's annoying habit of tacking a "thus through zero we understand God" bit on the end of nearly every chapter, it was a good read, particularly the historical and mathematical aspects.

Now Seife is tackling the cutting-edge speculative physics theorized by Professors Wachowksi and Wachowski, in his new work entitled Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes. Wait...seriously? That whole fucking thing is just the title? How long is the actual book, then? Damn, Chuck!

At any rate, according to a Salon.com article, Seife is really, really...saying pretty much the same thing that guy in your dorm said.

The universe might just be an enormous computer -- that's the final, mind-twisting pirouette at the conclusion of Charles Seife's new book about information theory and quantum computing, "Decoding the Universe." By the time you get to this suggestion, the statement seems pretty plausible, but by then you've already traveled through Seife's crystal-clear explications of thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes and multiple universes.

Well, maybe he gets a little more detailed than that guy in your dorm.

Still, when we get around to reading this book, there's one question we'd like, in advance, to know actually gets answered at some point in Seife's discussion: is there any demonstrable, observable — directly or indirectly — effect that would follow from his premise? Is there something we can detect; is there some test we can perform to either support or refute his thesis?

To us, the biggest problem with such conjecture is, in a nutshell, its inapplicability. Matrix-esque hypotheses, just like claims of an ineffable and unknowable supreme being, are simply irrelevant to our lives — not just our "daily" lives, but our entire intellectual journey as a species. If there "exists" something that, by definition, we can't know, then what's the basic point of pursuing it? What difference would it make if it does exist, if it has, by definition, no effect on us or anything we can observe?

There is, of course, a codicil on this dismissive approach to the unknowable — as an example, we can look to superstring theory and its corollaries. At this point, the concept of entirely separate universes which have no measurable effect on our own universe (the "branes" of M-theory) is, admittedly, an unknowable concept; if we can't measure it, and we can't observe it either directly or indirectly, then it might as well not exist. However, the huge difference between a scientific hypothesis like superstring theory and any "paranormal" claims, or Matrix-esque mental masturbation, is two-fold.

First, superstring theory is not spontaneously generated from a session of aimless philosophizing or an extraordinary misinterpretation of a mundane phenomenon. It is derived from mathematical equations which logically follow from observed phenomena. Many scientists have worked over the course of many decades to examine the mathematics, making sure that everything checks out. There is no "anecdote" that suggests the theory, there was no one person who "guessed" at all of the many different elements involved in the theory. Scientists simply followed the math, and it led to a surprising and interesting result.

Second, superstring theory, while it suggested nothing that we are currently able to detect, measure or observe, does suggest phenomena that we would be able to observe with finer instruments. Certain particles, certain behaviors and certain attributes are directly predicted by the equations of superstring theory. And if we survive long enough as a species, we may yet discover these predicted phenomena...or even discover something else which refutes the claims of superstring theorists. Essentially, though we are presently technologically incapable of testing superstring theorists' claims, they do produce testable claims — provided we achieve the level of technology necessary to test them!

These two attributes of real speculative science — that which logically leads to a hypothesis, and that which logically follows from it — are what make it quite different from late night bullshit sessions with your college roommates, or any claims of the paranormal or supernatural.

We haven't read Charles Seife's new book, of course, so we won't accuse him of poor science right off the bat. But as we said, we'll be very interested to know if there is anything concrete in his speculation, or if it is merely a chance to show off his knowledge of science, mathematics, and history, and not produce anything of much value. For the quick answer, we recommend heading over to our Wish List and buying us the book!

Save your money. The answer is 42.

You need to read Seth Lloyd's new book Programming the Universe. It's all in there.

Oops.. I meant to say it's all in there without resorting to Matrix like pseudo science.

If we are all inside a computer simulation you think I could hack the universe in order to make a large generic wad of cash come from nowhere?