Konrad Zuse, Digital Physics & Calculating Spaces

Konrad Zuse (German: [ˈkɔnʁat ˈtsuːzə]; 1910–1995) was a German civil engineer, inventor and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941.
Zuse was also noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process-controlled computer. He founded one of the earliest computer businesses in 1941, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943[1] to 1945[2] he designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül.[3] In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space).
Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the Nazi German government.[4] Due to World War II, Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and the United States. Possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946.
There is a replica of the Z3, as well as the original Z4, in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin has an exhibition devoted to Zuse, displaying twelve of his machines, including a replica of the Z1 and several of Zuse's paintings.

In physics and cosmology, digital physics is a collection of theoretical perspectives based on the premise that the universe is, at heart, describable by information, and is therefore computable. Therefore, the universe can be conceived of as either the output of a computer program, a vast, digital computation device, or mathematically isomorphic to such a device.
Digital physics is grounded in one or more of the following hypotheses; listed in order of decreasing strength. The universe, or reality:
- is essentially informational (although not every informational ontology needs to be digital)
- is essentially computable
- can be described digitally
- is in essence digital
- is itself a computer
- is the output of a simulated reality exercise

Calculating Space is the title of MIT's English translation of Konrad Zuse's 1969 book Rechnender Raum (literally: "space that is computing"), the first book on digital physics.[1]
Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed by some sort of cellular automaton or other discrete computing machinery,[1] challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out (among other things) that the classical notions of entropy and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes.
Bell's theorem is sometimes thought to contradict Zuse's hypothesis, but it is not applicable to deterministic universes, as Bell himself pointed out. Similarly, while Heisenberg's uncertainty principle limits in a fundamental way what an observer can observe, when the observer is himself a part of the universe he is trying to observe, that principle does not rule out Zuse's hypothesis, which views any observer as a part of the hypothesized deterministic process. So far there is no unambiguous physical evidence against the possibility that "everything is just a computation," and a large amount has been written about digital physics since Zuse's book appeared.