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Message: <blockquote data-quote="freyar" data-source="post: 6545822" data-attributes="member: 40227">The first point is that we should really separate relativity (both Einstein's theories, special and general) from quantum mechanics.  Then there's the combination of the two, or quantum gravity.  We should probably think about each type of physics separately.  I'll start just by saying: fun question!  First off, special and general relativity: I'd say thinking about host and client systems as you describe isn't very reflective of relativity as Einstein presented it (or the math, really).  Every observer agrees on what physical events happen.  So, both observers see one player get hit, and they see it happen at the same "point of space-time," meaning if I get hit at the corner of the building when the clock at that spot shows 12 noon (or whatever), everyone agrees on that.  But if you (at rest according to me) get hit two blocks away when your wristwatch reads 12 noon, different observers will disagree on which of us gets hit first and how many meters apart we are.  Certain events in a relativistic space-time are unordered, and our notions of distance and time can get bent a bit.'Quantum mechanics: This is a bit more interesting, though your proposal might be hard to implement with the mathematics of quantum mechanics (which just work).  I might add that this sounds to me more what you're asking about.  Anyway, what happens in orthodox quantum mechanics is that some portion of the universe is in an undetermined state (Schrodinger's cat is neither and both dead and alive at once, in likely a time-dependent proportion) until something makes a "measurement."  Then the universe "decides" once and for all what the state is --- the cat "becomes" either dead or alive.  Here you might be able to work in some client (measurement)/host (universe) dichotomy with that.  However, the issue with this approach to quantum mechanics is that it treats the part of the universe that does the "measuring" differently than the part that gets measured.  Many physicists prefer some variation of what's called the "many worlds" approach (somewhat tongue-in-cheek).  In this version, measurement makes the whole state of the universe split --- so before, the cat is dead & alive; after, we think the cat is dead PLUS we think the cat is alive.  It's just that the two different "pieces" of the universe can't talk to each other.  This is actually a lot more self-consistent in terms of logic.  So the host computer in this sense is doing parallel computing and different clients sort of have different games, in a hand-wavy sense.Quantum gravity is a lot more fuzzy since it's hard to even know what we mean by space, time, or events in some ways.  It has to incorporate both of the relativistic and quantum points of view.  But it's hard to see how to make a sensible theory that doesn't have different observers agree on the actually happenings.Of course the main thing I haven't stated is that, however we want to think about it, we have to put it into math to make a real physical theory out of it.  The descriptions above are, at the core, just (somewhat clumsy) translations of the math into English.</blockquote>

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