Should We Hack Physics?

What Could We Do with a Reprogrammable Universe?

I have a question. What’s the absolute furthest we can take this whole science thing? Understanding every law of the universe? Developing a theory of everything to explain every law? Inventing every possible technology allowed by those laws? Short of there being no end to our scientific journey, I think the furthest we could go is actually writing the laws of reality ourselves. But is that a bad idea?

In my last article, I laid out my idea for how we might achieve control over physics itself, provided our universe is(or behaves like) a very special kind of AI-generated simulation. But I’ve yet to elaborate on what it would look like to employ reprogrammable physics. So today I’d like to use some of my favorite works of science fantasy to paint a picture of what our technology might look like when it becomes (almost) indistinguishable from magic, starting with Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.

Fullmetal Alchemist perfectly portrays the unbridled, childlike joy that would come from having physical reality bend to your whim. After all, what could possibly go wrong with…

Oh. Scratch that. Fullmetal Alchemist takes a stark look at the dangers of playing god…literally. Suffice it to say, we’ll definitely want to be extremely careful if we choose to reprogram our reality. Among other dangers I’ll discuss later, we don’t want to experiment with altering the laws of physics on a universal scale. Doing so could accidentally render our home inhospitable with nowhere and no time to escape. Instead, we’ll want to do what alchemists appear to do in Fullmetal, temporarily alter the physics of specific objects or regions of space.

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