A Quantum Mechanical Supertask

Hypercomputation and the Physical Church-Turing Thesis

A version of the Church-Turing Thesis states that every effectively realizable physical system can be defined by Turing Machines (‘Thesis P’); in this formulation the Thesis appears an empirical, more than a logico-mathematical, proposition. We review the main approaches to computation beyond Turing definability (‘hypercomputation’): supertask, non-well-founded, analog, quantum, and retrocausal...

The collapse of supertasks

A supertask consists in the performance of an infinite number of actions in a finite time. I show that any attempt to carry out a supertask will produce a divergence of the curvature of spacetime, resulting in the formation of a black hole. I maintain that supertaks, contrarily to a popular view among philosophers, are physically impossible. Supertasks, literally, collapse under their own weight.

Two Ways Of Looking At A Newtonian Supertask

Supertask computation

Infinite time Turing machines extend the classical Turing machine concept to transfinite ordinal time, thereby providing a natural model of infinitary computability that sheds light on the power and limitations of supertask algorithms.

A quantum-mechanical study on nitro and amino derivatives of 1,2,3,4-tetrazine