Building toy universes to find out what is really underneath.
I'm a software architect, not a physicist. I build small deterministic machines — model universes — and count what happens inside them, to test how much of quantum mechanics, entropy and time a mechanism with no dice can actually produce.
Every claim in this series is counted from code you can run. Every episode ships a companion repository that regenerates its numbers with one command, and an archived, citable snapshot. When a machine fails, the failure gets published too.
The series
Newest first. 16 of 16 mirrored here so far — the rest open on Substack.
Episode 16Here
Spooky Action on the Ledger
Two particles, far apart, agree on an answer neither was carrying. On the ledger it is neither spooky nor action.
Episode 15Here
No Waves, No Spacetime
In a toy universe, spacetime is something that happens to waves — gravity as a crowd, time as a budget, and at the bottom of the crowd a black hole with no singularity.
Episode 14Here
The Poor Cat Experiments
Schrödinger's cat and Wigner's friend, demystified with a programming construct every developer uses daily.
Episode 13Here
The Iceberg Model
What if the quantum weirdness is just what a big distributed system looks like from the inside?
Episode 12Here
What Time Is
Time is not a thing that flows. It's a comparison — and the structure a comparison needs turns out to be the one my own industry invented for itself.
Episode 11Here
The Observer That Had To Touch
I spent this whole quest watching my machines. Then I understood that watching can never work.
Episode 10Here
The Almost-Crystal
The most beautiful in-between thing in physics auditioned for two jobs in my toy universe — and failed both, for the same reason. It cannot hide.
Episode 9Here
The Fluid in the Wave Function
Unzip the imaginary number and the wave function turns into a flowing liquid. I spent a long time trying to make that liquid real.
Episode 8Here
The Crypto Bet
I went shopping for randomness in the one industry that manufactures it — and came home with a very good music box.
Episode 7Here
The Lattice That Was Too Perfect
I played with lattices — thousands of coupled pendulums — to see if they could build real waves and a real particle on their own. This is how far they went, and where they stopped.
Episode 6Here
The Droplet That Walks
I tried to build a probability wave and failed. So this time I went looking for one that already exists — a droplet of oil that bounces on a vibrating bath and builds its own wave, one splash at a time. Then I sat it down for a quantum exam.
Episode 5Here
Building a Wave
I wanted a probability cloud that spreads into a shape and then stops — and oscillates. I built six worlds to find one. Here is exactly how each of them failed.
Episode 4Here
I Never Understood Entropy
I built a billiard table with sixteen balls and no friction, to find out what entropy actually is.
Episode 3Here
The Machine Takes a Quantum Exam
Twenty questions, one deterministic clockwork, and the two answers it could not give.
Episode 2Here
The Machine
How a clockwork with no dice fakes quantum mechanics — the machine taken apart, the exam it passed, and the one wall it cannot get past.
Episode 1Here
The Universe with No Dice
Is anything truly random — and how much of quantum mechanics can a machine with no dice fake?
