Science & Tech Quote by Rudy Rucker

Rucker is smuggling a radical premise into an almost polite conditional: treat nature as if it computes, and computer science stops being merely a human toolkit and becomes a lens on reality’s allowable moves. The phrasing matters. “If we suppose” signals a speculative stance, but it also disarms the reader: this isn’t dogma, it’s an invitation to adopt a powerful metaphor and see what it buys you. Then comes the pivot from “natural phenomena” to “in effect computations.” That “in effect” is the tell. Rucker isn’t claiming rocks run Python; he’s arguing that the behavior of systems can be characterized by information processing, rules, and constraints - the same ingredients that define computation.

The subtext is a reversal of disciplinary hierarchy. Physics has long positioned computation as its servant: models, simulations, numerical methods. Rucker flips it, implying that theoretical computer science - with its notions of computability, complexity, and limits - might legislate what nature can do at all. If certain processes would require non-computable functions, infinite precision, or super-polynomial resources, maybe they’re not just hard to simulate; maybe they’re impossible in the universe we inhabit.

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th-century current that includes cellular automata, digital physics, and the “it from bit” suspicion that information is more fundamental than matter. Rucker, bridging scientific imagination and cyberpunk sensibility, pitches a worldview where algorithms aren’t just abstractions; they’re candidates for the universe’s operating style. The intent isn’t to reduce wonder to code. It’s to widen the stakes of computer science: its deepest theories become not about machines we build, but about the kinds of worlds that can exist.