Foreword: Occam’s Ultimate Razor

Preface: Occam’s Ultimate Razor

The history of physics is a history of continuously searching for deeper “source code.”

Three hundred years ago, Newton made us believe that the universe is a precise clockwork, driven by the springs of absolute time and space; one hundred years ago, Einstein told us that the clockwork does not exist, that spacetime itself is a pliable body that can be bent; meanwhile, Bohr and Heisenberg discovered in the microscopic world that the essence of reality is a probability cloud of dice-throwing.

Today, we stand between two magnificent yet incompatible theoretical edifices: one is the geometric temple of General Relativity, smooth and deterministic, describing how gravity weaves spacetime; the other is the probabilistic maze of Quantum Mechanics, discrete and non-deterministic, describing how particles jump in Hilbert space. These two languages are immensely successful in their respective domains, but when we attempt to peer into the horizon of black holes or trace back to the moment of the Big Bang, they collide violently—geometry produces infinite singularities, probability leads to information loss.

This schism has persisted for nearly a century of patching, yet remains unhealed. Perhaps the problem is not that we are not smart enough to find answers within the existing framework, but that the framework itself is wrong. We have been trying to forcibly stuff “quantum” into the box of “geometry,” or quantize “gravity” as a field.

What if neither of these is the underlying truth?

This book proposes a radical, minimalist ontology: Physical reality is not composed of matter, energy, or fields, but of “information” and “the process of information processing.”

John Wheeler once proposed the famous “It from Bit.” This book pushes this idea to its logical extreme and endows it with dynamic form: It from Qubit Processing.

In this book, we make only one assumption, a single, irreducible axiom—the Ultimate Axiom $\Omega$:

The universe is a Quantum Cellular Automaton (QCA) operating on discrete lattice points, following local unitary evolution rules.

Beyond this, there is nothing else. No presupposed spacetime background, no presupposed mass parameters, no presupposed speed of light limit, and no presupposed gravitational equations.

We invite readers to witness a logical magic trick: starting from this single seed alone, how the entire edifice of modern physics will be “grown” anew.

• We will prove that the speed of light is not a traffic speed limit set by God, but the maximum bandwidth for information transmission in the lattice network.

• We will prove that Special Relativity is merely a statistical result of resource allocation of information rates between “external displacement” and “internal computation”—the Light Path Conservation Law we derive ($v_{ext}^2+v_{int}^2=c^2$) exposes this deep mechanism nakedly in the mathematical sunlight.

• We will prove that mass is not an inherent property of matter, but information dead loops trapped at microscopic scales by topological structures; and inertia is the energy cost required for a system to maintain its existence when internal time is frozen.

• We will prove that gravity is not a fundamental interaction, but geometric distortion that must occur for the spacetime network to maintain consistency (unitarity) of information transmission—Einstein’s field equations are essentially the “equation of state” of the information manifold.

This is Occam’s Ultimate Razor. We shave away the illusion of continuity, shave away infinite divergences, shave away artificially introduced parameters. What remains is a crystal-clear universe composed purely of logic and computation.

In this universe, observers are no longer ghosts standing outside, but subroutines capable of self-referential computation; consciousness is no longer a mysterious byproduct, but the highest topological form in the information network.

This is a journey of reconstruction from “ontology” to “phenomenology.” For physicists accustomed to continuous spacetime and differential equations, the landscape here may seem unfamiliar or even angular. But I believe that when you reach the final chapter and see how discrete bits emerge into continuous reality, see how the familiar stars, gravity, and time are born from the void of computation, you will feel an unprecedented beauty of logic.

The universe is not merely like a computer. The universe is computation itself.

Let us begin running this code.

Author’s Note

Many core derivations in this book (such as the Light Path Conservation Theorem, the volume conservation correction of optical metrics, and the combinatorial proof of Born’s rule) are based on a series of research papers by the author in recent years. To ensure reading fluency, complex mathematical proofs are placed in appendices or specific chapters, but this does not mean mathematics is unimportant. On the contrary, it is the rigidity of mathematics that supports the entire weight of this philosophical conception.