We examine the current status of the physical version of the Church-Turing Thesis (PhCT for short) in view of latest developments in spacetime theory. This also amounts to investigating the status of hypercomputation in view of latest results on spacetime. We agree with Deutsch et al [17] that PhCT is not only a conjecture of mathematics but rather a conjecture of a combination of theoretical physics, mathematics and, in some sense, cosmology. Since the idea of computability is intimately connected with the nature of Time, relevance of spacetime theory seems to be unquestionable. We will see that recent developments in spacetime theory show that temporal developments may exhibit features that traditionally seemed impossible or absurd. We will see that recent results point in the direction that the possibility of artificial systems computing non-Turing computable functions may be consistent with spacetime theory. All these trigger new open questions and new research directions for spacetime theory, cosmology, and computability.

Abstract We present an analog and machine-independent algebraic characterization of elementarily computable functions over the real num-bers in the sense of recursive analysis: we prove that they correspond to the smallest class of functions that contains some basic functions, and closed by composition, linear integration, and a simple limit schema. We generalize this result to all higher levels of the Grzegorczyk Hierarchy. This paper improves several previous partial characterizations and has a dual interest: Concerning recursive analysis, our results provide machine-indepen-dent characterizations of natural classes of computable functions over the real numbers, allowing to dene these classes without usual con-siderations on higher-order (type 2) Turing machines. Concerning analog models, our results provide a characterization of the power of a natural class of analog models over the real numbers and provide new insights for understanding the relations between several analog computational models. 1

Church thesis and its variants say roughly that all reasonable models of computation do not have more power than Turing Machines. In a contrapositive way, they say that any model with super-Turing power must have something unreasonable. Our aim is to discuss how much theoretical computer science can quantify this, by considering several classes of continuous time dynamical systems, and by studying how much they can be proved Turing or super-Turing. 1

Up to Turing power, all computations are describable by suitable programs, which correspond to the prescription by finite means of some rational parameters of the system or some computable reals. ¿From Turing power up we have computations that are not describable by finite means: computation without a program. When we observe natural phenomena and endow them with computational significance, it is not the algorithm we are observing but the process. Some objects near us may be performing hypercomputation: we observe them, but we will never be able to simulate their behaviour on a computer. What is then the profit of such a theory of computation to Science?

Since 1996, some models of recursive functions over the real numbers have been analyzed by several researchers. It could be expected that they exhibit a computational power much greater than that of Turing machines (as other well known models of computation over the real numbers already considered in the past fifteen years, like neural net models with real weights). The fact is that they have not got such a power. Although they decide the classical halting problem of Turing machines, they have almost the same limitations of Turing machines. Our profit on them has been to represent classical complexity classes (like P or NP) by analytical means, and possibly relate them by unusual ways.

We examine the current status of the physical version of the Church-Turing Thesis (PhCT for short) in view of latest developments in spacetime theory. This also amounts to investigating the status of hypercomputation in view of latest results on spacetime. We agree with [D. Deutsch, A. Ekert, R. Lupacchini, Machines, logic and quantum physics, Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 6 (3) (2000) 265–283] that PhCT is not only a conjecture of mathematics but rather a conjecture of a combination of theoretical physics, mathematics and, in some sense, cosmology. Since the idea of computability is intimately connected with the nature of time, relevance of spacetime theory seems to be unquestionable. We will see that recent developments in spacetime theory show that temporal developments may exhibit features that traditionally seemed impossible or absurd. We will see that recent results point in the direction that the possibility of artificial systems computing non-Turing computable functions may be consistent with spacetime theory. All these trigger new open questions and new research directions for spacetime theory, cosmology, and computability. Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Of all the entities I have encountered in my life in physics, none approaches the black hole in fascination. And none, I think, is a more important constituent of this universe we call home. The black hole epitomizes the revolution wrought by general relativity. It pushes to an extreme—and therefore tests to the limit—the features of general relativity (the dynamics of curved spacetime) that set it apart from special relativity (the physics of static, ‘‘flat’ ’ spacetime) and the earlier mechanics of Newton. Spacetime curvature. Geometry as part of physics. Gravitational radiation. All of these things become, with black holes, not tiny corrections to older physics, but the essence of newer physics.