Avicia is a contraction of ‘a-‘ meaning ‘not’, ‘vice’ (vitium) meaning ‘fault’, and ‘-ia’ meaning ‘land’. A world without fault.
I am Rowan Grigg, a retired systems engineer based in Canberra, Australia. I have been developing the Superposition hypothesis for more than forty years. It is a synthesis of physics, philosophy of mind, ecology, economics, and eschatology that attempts to answer, in plain language, the question of what is actually going on here.
The hypothesis proposes that the most fundamental constituent of the Universe is a self-simulating pair of abstract Turing machines, neither of which exists except when simulated by the other. From this single premise, the speed of light, quantum entanglement, the accelerating expansion of space, the nature of consciousness, and the mechanics of resurrection all follow as consequences rather than postulates. The economic and ecological vision that emerges, a post-scarcity circular economy on a million-millennia timescale, is the civilisational structure that both the physics and the ethics demand.
The Hidden Menu
Every sophisticated device has a hidden configuration layer beneath its surface presentation. On a smartphone, a long press in the right place reveals the developer options, settings that the manufacturer didn’t advertise, parameters that govern the behaviour of the whole system. A friend of mine recently discovered this the hard way when he bought a new iPhone which wouldn’t pair with his car, and the official channels came up with nothing. The solution turned out to be a hidden menu in the car’s head unit, reached through a sequence nobody had told him about. Once found, everything worked.
The Superposition hypothesis is an attempt to find the hidden menu of reality itself.
The mystics of every tradition have been looking for the same thing through contemplative practice. The Kabbalists through mapping the sefirot as the emanations of the infinite Ein Sof, the Sufi masters through navigating toward fana, and the Buddhist meditators through attending to the ground beneath the ground of experience. They were right in believing that such a layer exists. What the Superposition hypothesis adds is a compact description of its architecture. A vast computational substrate, outside space and time, from which all physical reality emerges and in which every human life is stored.
The quantum computing research programme is, in this light, humanity’s first systematic attempt to find an interface to the Superposition that is equivalent to that long press on a device screen. Craig Hogan’s Holometer at Fermilab is probing the granularity of spacetime at scales where the lattice structure of the Superposition should become detectable. The results so far are inconclusive, but the search continues.
In the meantime, the essays and documents on this site represent forty years of working toward the same hidden menu from a different direction. Not through experiment alone, nor through contemplation alone, but through the patient triangulation of physics, philosophy, theology, and plain common sense.
A Note on Process
In 2026, I began working with an AI as an editorial collaborator. The ideas are mine and predate any AI by decades. What the collaboration has provided is a rigorous structure and a demanding interlocutor, the kind of stress-testing that forty years of largely solitary development had lacked. I mention this not as a disclaimer but as an honest account of how the current documents came to be.
The Documents
The core document is The Superposition Hypothesis, designed to be read in one sitting, while three companion pieces approach the same territory from different angles:
- We Are Not Alone covers the cosmological case, and the question of other civilisations
- One River, Many Bridges covers the theological and spiritual traditions, and where they converge
- A Day in the Commonwealth of Heaven is a narrative sketch of the world the hypothesis predicts
Three contemporary updates connect the framework to current developments in physics, economics, and artificial intelligence.
The earlier essays, Physics without Formulae, The Very Big Company, and A Mechanism for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence, record the development of the Superposition hypothesis. They are less polished, longer, and sometimes contradictory, but they illustrate the journey.
I am interested in dialogue with anyone who engages seriously with the material. The correspondence page is open.
Begin with the core hypothesis…