352 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? This Universe could be preprogrammed with every theory we could ever discover within it. (There would be no arbitrary problems.) This argument neatly sidesteps Turing’s theorem by specifying there is no such thing as an arbitrary problem -— a random problem picked from the infinite set of problems. At the same time, it sets certain characteristics of such a Universe and I believe we can test these... A computable Universe must already know the solution to every problem it will encounter above the logic limit: It cannot discover knowledge on the fly. For many problems, a small number of fundamental rules can account for everything. Although our galaxy and the beautiful nebulae we see through our telescopes look complex, they might be the result of some such simple set of rules — just like a fractal. That’s Stephen Wolfram’s solution to the mystery of our Universe. But some problems are complex. The solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem is an 80 page document consisting of 5 million bits of information. All this must be stored somewhere in the Universe. It might not be stored as a string of bytes, it could be found in a set of equations governing the motion of the atoms such that at some point — in 1995 to be exact — they all line up in Andrew Wiles’ brain to direct his fingers to type out the proof. In this case, the Universe has solved a mathematical puzzle because it was specifically set up to do so from the time of the Big Bang, but this raises three questions: Where does the Universe store this enormous amount of information? How does The Universe hold the information reliably? How did the pre-Universe solve the problem, so it might program the Universe at the moment of the Big Bang? The first question is probably answerable. The Universe is a big place and could store sufficient information to solve the mysteries that puzzle the inquisitive creatures that inhabit its planes. There are many practical problems to consider, suc