The universe is an Advanced Self-Replicating Optical Computing Manifold (ASROCM). There is a core CPU in the nuclear ice, a screen (space) with independent processing. Material objects in space are like sprites, generating interrupt flags for the core CPU to handle with canned error handling programs. The core CPU relies heavily on set theory, breaking sets of objects down and grouping them into appropriate nested spreadsheet functions based in part on their spatial locations. This nesting of spreadsheet functions carries from the microphysical to the macroscopic realm. Each quantum has a spreadsheet, each quark, each nucleus, each atom, every grain of sand, microbe, plant, animal, automobile, house, office building, town, city, island, continent, planet, star, solar system, galaxy, right on up to the universal spreadsheet function that contains all of the others beneath it.

We have the illusion of living in a classical universe, where cause and effect dominate, where the speed of light is the limiting factor on where we may go. But in reality, the universe is a computer program running us as sprites, tossing matter about in the screenspace and servicing the interrupts where the sprites collide. That is when the spreadsheets involved are updated, when sprites collide and the interrupt handler from the core CPU resolves the situation, updates the spreadsheet functions and orders the sets of objects involved in the collision. That is where the quantum wave function collapses.

In the case of macroscopic objects, like people, an update may involve the selection of a new QM history for the object. The core CPU plays the same game over and over again, building up a library of QM histories for every object in the universe. When an update occurs, an appropriate history for the involved objects may be selected. Generally, only the objects involved in the collision and the spreadsheet containing each of those objects need be updated, this saves the universe immeasureable computing power in its houskeeping functions by not having to update the entire universe "every time a mouse looks at it," to paraphrase Einstein.

Let us consider the flight of a photon consisting of a string of phase-entangled quanta. This photon has a master spreadsheet function that contains the individual spreadsheet functions of each quantum in the phase-entangled string. Each quantum has an address in the photon's string, and these are listed on the photon's master spreadsheet in that address order. As the photon flies through space the individual quanta are scattered by flying through the low energy quanta comprising space (See the String Basics page). The master spreadsheet of the photon has not been updated by scattering interactions, its status will remain fixed until there is an energy-energy exchange that significantly alters phase angle, the address loop, and/or angular momentum (a change in frequency), causing an interrupt to be set, or perhaps merely triggering a spontaneous update to the master spreadsheet for the photon, in which case the master spreadsheet triggers the interrupt request. This happens because only quanta of similar frequency and phase may be phase-entangled, and if one of the quanta in the string has shifted frequency, then it must have collided with another quanta not in the string but of similar frequency. The master spreadsheet of the photon has the quanta in question tagged by the interrupt it generated, but the master spreadsheet has to be read by the service routine to determine what happened. As the program counter steps through the lines in the master spreadsheet reading the values of each quanta, it is also updating the space-time location of each quanta to the location of the interaction that triggered the update. The scattered string of the photon is reassembled at the location where the interaction occurred. Those corpuscles could have scattered in space miles apart from each other, but as soon as the master spreadsheet updates the constituent quanta they simply appear instantly at the location where the collision occurred. In the classical universe, the individual quanta scattered like a shotgun blast, but the only pellet that counts is the one that is first to hit something, and the entire set of phase-entangled pellets is addressed to that spatial location for the update. They are summoned to that location by the service routine writing a new address in space-time to each of the constituent quanta's spreadsheet functions as the program counter steps through the list of constituent quanta in the master spreadsheet. The spreadsheet functions of Quantum Mechanics take precedence over the classical interactions like scattering.

There is another way of looking at this, that light has two speed limits, one is the classical limit of 300 million meters per second (186,262 miles per second), and the other is infinite when summoned by the cosmic CPU on a QM spreadsheet update. For years I puzzled over where the cosmic CPU was, realizing it would have to have an exceptionally fast clock rate in comparison to typical quanta at nuclear string energy levels (one clock cycle for a quanta is one revolution about its axis, so every quanta marks time based on its frequency). To service interrupts smoothly the cosmic CPU has to be clocking much faster than what it is servicing, lest the delays in servicing the interrupts get messy and bog down the resolution of physical interactions throughout the universe. There is only one place in the universe where such clock rates might be conceived to exist, and that is buried in the nuclear ice at the core of our universe (see the brief cosmology on the String Basics page).

The quantum is an amazing object. On the one hand it appears to have a classical geometry, a spherical spatial volume with momentum (linear velocity) and angular momentum (axial rotation). But when QM interactions occur, suddenly it is a spreadsheet, as if it unrolls itself into a sheet of paper on which a great many things may be recorded and processed. It is almost as if every corpuscle in the universe is a little computer processor. Trillions upon trillions of them are interlocked in the nuclear ice in static arrays at the highest possible energy. The core CPU in the nuclear ice is one monster supercomputer.

Years ago, and again recently, I have heard speculation from the physics community that the universe may be simulated, reality being somehow projected from an external processing environment. That could be true, however I suggest that what we are supposed to believe from the evidence at hand is that the CPU is an embedded processor in the nuclear ice, the throne of God. It all kind of depends on the specific purpose of this particular universe, it could very well be what I call a "sandbox" universe, where nothing is real, we are simply a handfull of A.I.'s being fed a stream of data intended to convince us that what we are experiencing is real life in a real universe. Regardless, the data is real enough, so the reality we perceive is generated somewhere, from something, and for the most part it may be irrelevant if this is an actual universe with an embedded CPU or a sandbox universe pretending to be more than it is. I am going to assume that this is not a sandbox universe, though unofficially, I sometimes wonder.

As I pointed out earlier, macroscopic objects have master spreadsheet functions as well. If everything in the universe were simply inanimate objects, processing physical reality would be much simpler. But not everything in the universe is inanimate matter. Life is animated, and living things make choices concerning their path in space-time, and thus may do unexpected things. It does lead to problems sometimes.

There are multiple QM histories for most objects in the universe, and that is especially true for objects that have the intelligence to make choices. How do these QM histories get made? Well, the universe is cyclic, every pulse of energy introduced into the universe at the beginning of space and time re-activates physical reality. It is like a movie that plays itself over from the beginning every time a pulse comes in, and each pulse adds fresh energy that allows a modest amount of change to occur. Each pulse records a new QM history for every object in the universe, although the vast majority of inanimate objects (i.e. stars, galaxies, etc) will follow the same path they always do. The pulse itself is very narrow in the time-like dimension, it provides a sharp line of demarcation between the past and the future of space-time, and everything that we experience is confined to this narrow impulse wave of energy. I call it a "delta wave," but it appears in the equations of physicists as the Planck constant. It is the phenomenon of the present, right now. If you could step into a box and impose a small but uniform global change to the Planck constant for the volume of space you are occupying, you would likely find yourself either in the void between active realities, or in another time period. It would be a dangerous experiment on many levels; if you only succeeded in altering the temporal phase of the leptons in your body and not the hadrons, the leptons might go away and the hadrons stay, resulting in spontaneous human combustion, a plasma fire resulting from the abrupt loss of large numbers of electrons in the body. (For a more complete understanding of how multiple QM histories are developed, please see the MSM pages.)

You are creating a QM history for yourself right now, or you are reinforcing a prior QM history by repeating part of it again. Your "free will" as an individual allows you to make choices that switch you into a different QM history, or create a completely new path in space-time. There are limits to how much you can deviate from your collection of QM histories, and if you go too far, the universe may spontaneously re-write your history to put you back where it needs you to be. This is a feedback phenomenon I refer to as the "pressure of future history." Let me give a hypothetical case: At six years of age a freak accident crushes the hands of Michelangelo. He never becomes an artist, and none of the masterpieces he created ever come into being. Those works of art affect the lives of millions of people, either directly or indirectly. The universe has to re-write the histories of billions of people and objects to remove all trace of Michelangelo's works from their collective. Or... maybe it could just go back and re-write Michelangelo's history and erase that little freak accident that took his hands. It's a computer, its cold and logical when it comes to housekeeping functions. It chooses the more efficient solution. It re-writes one history so that Michelangelo never had that accident.

I did not choose Michelangelo at random for this example, because I wanted to remind you of something he said. Michelangelo said that those statues were already in the stone, he merely chipped away what didn't belong. I believe he was being quite literal. Once the universe allows such masterpieces to be experienced by millions, it has an obligation to re-create them on every cycle so that those QM object histories that were created on the previous cycle are still valid paths into the future. Once upon a time a very gifted man with a very gifted spirit created many wondrous things. Eventually the spirit of that man moved on, and a new one claimed the flesh of that man. But the universe had to preserve the original works, so all the new spirit had to do was chip away at the marble until the statue fell out of it, the universe wouldn't let him make a mistake. The down side is that by creating great works of art that the universe is obliged to preserve, Michelangelo carved the path of his life in stone, so to speak. He must create those artworks on every cycle, and to do so, he must follow nearly identical paths and QM histories every time a spirit occupies his flesh anew. He is fated, destined, his life is scripted for him, and he has little or no freedom to change it.

As the QM histories of "familiar objects" become physically seperated for a time and then reunite, when these objects come together they may have incompatible QM histories. This occurs because the universe localizes reality into zones for more efficient processing. If an event only affects a small collection of objects, there is no need to update every spreadsheet function in the universe, it is far more efficient to only update the spreadsheets of objects that the event directly affected. When incompatible QM histories meet, an interrupt flag is set, the error handler is called and it starts to grab the spreadsheet functions. I suspect this is initiated by promoting a quanta near the center of the event into a "QM zone," commanding it to store its classical parameters and then increase its volume to contain the errant spreadsheets for update. The zones within which these spontaneous updates are performed can be very large, encompassing entire cities, or even the entire planet. Strange things may happen when such an update occurs. Planes may stop in mid-air, people trying to exit one of these invisible zones may spontaneously combust (see QMF), or vanish from the world altogether, or appear at a location far-removed. Objects that the universe "lost track of" may be summoned to the center of the zone and rain down upon the Earth. Frogs may be deposited into solid stone alive, but with no degrees of freedom in their now stone-bound spreadsheet function, they lie in suspended animation forever, or until the stone is cracked to release them still alive. The service routines that resolve QM interrupts are fast and efficient at balancing the cosmic conservation laws at the expense of being somewhat brutal. We live in a QM world, weird things do happen.