AMS gets a second life

The repairs to the AMS were apparently successful, which is great news for AMS and the HEP community (https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/01/nasa-esa-challenging-ams-repair-spacewalks/). The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is the best idea in HEP that hasn't yet produced an important discovery. I have only heard about their measurements of the positron fraction and searches for anti-matter, but I think they are most promising for a "Who ordered that?" type discovery.

The simulation Test

I propose a Simulation Test based on the Simulation Hypothesis. The test is this, is a given purported supernatural event reasonable within the Simulation Hypothesis. Namely, is the purported supernatural event reasonable if you assume we exist in a simulation and the supernatural event was caused directly by the Simulator ‘interfering’ with the simulation.

For example, resurrection can pass the simulation test since it would be easy for the Simulator to take information from one place in the simulation and copy it to another. This type of interference, which is similar in some general sense to feeding the multitudes, is easy to explain and to motivate in our experience with simulations. Healing, where disease leaves the body, would also pass the simulation test as it would be easy for the Simulator to delete certain information through various memory states.

Let’s consider other purported, now considered absurd, supernatural events. Such as lightning strikes. Or the seasons each year. Or rain, however frequent it is. Is it reasonable, even ignoring our natural explanations for such events, for the Simulator to make so many repeated and structured modifications to the simulation? Or would such repeated events be included in a model or routine which is called at many points in the simulation (and so we would probably classify as natural and not supernatural)? So a miraculous hypothesis for such events would not pass the Simulation Test.

For a test to be useful, it needs to be applicable to a current point of discussion (even if one that some people feel is absurd). So let’s consider the interpretation of the biblical story of creation that many Young Earth Creationists hold. In this interpretation, the simulation behaves in a completely different manner in each of what should be called the first seven days and even though the simulation on the seventh day has some surface similarities to the simulation observed now, that it was still fundamentally completely different. Not only that, but that all of those changes were made by interference by the Simulator.

This seems implausible. It might be plausible for the Simulator to start a simulation at an interesting point or to start one simulation, stop it and make fundamental changes to the simulation, and then restart from the point the previous simulation had stopped. But in the Young Earth Creationist interpretation, either that the physics we observe now was the same physics during creation and that the 7 days were defined by continual supernatural events which have no impact on the universe we observe now or that radically different physics exists on each of the 7 days which have no relation to the physics that we observe now or the physics of the previous days, fails the Simulation Test.

Other interpretations of supernatural events in Judaism/Christianity might fail this test. I think the sun standing still for Joshua could be explained by a supernatural event changing the index of refraction and not by the failing interpretation of repeated supernatural events causing the Earth to change its rotation with no other impact other than the change of the Sun's observed movement in the sky.