Physics is stagnating. We haven’t had any significant, new theoretical breakthroughs in decades. Do we need a radically new way of understanding the universe? If we treat the world as a neural network which is in the process of learning, then we can better understand quantum gravity, quantum computing and consciousness, writes Vitaly Vanchurin.

Physicists of the 20th century deserve a lot of credit. They came up with not one, but with two ground-breaking discoveries: quantum mechanics and general relativity. Yes, they had a good starting point, thanks to classical and statistical physics, but still the progress made was astonishing. Take for instance cosmology. Who would have thought that you can describe fluctuations during cosmic inflation before the big bang using quantum mechanics and then apply the rules of general relativity to study their evolution after the big bang? But if you do it right (thanks to Alexei Starobinsky, Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, Slava Mukhanov, Gennady Chibosov and others) you obtain very specific predictions that were later confirmed first by The Cosmic Background Explorer and later by Planck experiments. Remarkable, but the fairy-tale ends there. We still have no idea what drove inflation, or what dark energy or dark matter. Clearly, we are missing something big and many researchers (including myself) believe that we need a new theoretical framework which can unify the discoveries of the previous century. Whether it will be based on string theory, on quantum information or on neural networks, the new theoretical framework will likely to be transformational.