Nine years ago, a Brazilian student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, where I used to lecture, came to me with what I initially took to be a tall tale. She described an obscure new cult that prayed in binary numbers (strings of ones and zeros), the fundamental elements of computer programs. The cult’s founder apparently believed that the universe was a giant computer.
After a summer vacation back home, the student reappeared with a videotape to prove her case. Cult members were dressed in voluptuous, kitschy robes that aliens might have worn in the original Star Trek. They chanted in Portuguese: Zero, um, um, zero, zero, um. . . . The video looks authentic, though I haven’t been able to come up with any independent confirmation, and if anyone could pull off a hoax of this magnitude, it would be a wily ITP student.
The first thought that came into my mind was that this cult had better be mistaken: If they were right, the universe might crash as a result of the slightest mistake in their recitations. (At the binary level, even a single wrong bit can cause a computer crash.)
