A digital universe created as it were by a pointillist artist of physics is a novel idea of the 20th century that has emerged as a secular rival to natural evolution theory. Some might regard natural evolution as complimentary to a digital universe embedded within in initial parameters of a Universe without setting them. In that sense evolution itself would be a fluke determined incidental to a Universe that may have had many alternative boundary conditions. What is a digital universe?
If undifferentiated fields of unknown origin are the fundamental phenomena of being, points made from breaking up fields into small units would be a logical egression to engender pluralism. Points or strings as units could be fundamental components – each digit assigned a mathematical variable or constant value, or infinite scalar field ordinal and cardinal relative values, of a proto-digital universe. An omniscient artist emanating fields relative to spirit, or a spiritual digital programmer-author setting boundary conditions, or even some sort of self-starting digital designer from eternity might know to control fields and field variations and compositions so well as to order all of the basic physical constructions, atoms, molecules and relativistic fields of a universe construction. I believe that is what is meant by a digital universe. Although there is another meaning to consider.
Some regard a digital universe as a simulation that seems real to sentient minds embedded within it as if they were in a Matrix, Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions or Matrix Resurrection paradigm. In that simulation a real universe made from natural evolution is believed to still exist, yet sentients are unaware of the real universe and in some way have their minds with apparent bodies existing within a fake, simulated universe. The developments of virtual reality entertainment devices were people experience visually comprehensive places produced for their eyes see has supported the extrapolation as in the movie Tron, that people can in some way live in a digitally constructed universe operated by a computer though someplace outside a natural physical universe exists.
Simulated universes aren’t likely to have much cosmological investigation into boundary conditions of the timeline origin of a universe. They won’t have WMAP observations of cosmic background radiation to inference the earliest dispersion pattern of mass and energy in a big bang of some kind. They aren’t likely to invest in Hubble or Webb space telescopes to view the oldest and earliest stars of the Universe (or their aged light). One might wonder if any Universe that exists should need to have a big bang and inflation origin or if the observable universe of any existing universe should necessarily be such that the original light is within view of observers living while the light can still be observed if the Universe is expanding.
Why would a great explosion at point time=0 occur anyway? Some have speculated that energy was concentrated at an infinite point singularity like a Dictator with all of the money in existence and that is was destabilized all of a sudden and burst out in a cosmic spending spree that last only for a while, and then the entire Universe was inflated greatly because all of the new space was rich with energy and demand for more created economic inflation (some humor in that paradigm). The break up of a singularity because of quantum jitters is not a cinched theory though, even if subsequent observations seem to support it, since there may be innumerable alternative explanations for that start including digital scripting.
If energy were dropped into absolute space from a concentration dispersion into nothingness seems natural. At what speed would energy disperse? Einstein might have written that the speed of light squared- moving away from itself would be the pace if he also assumed that the initial space existed and existed with dimensions without qualities except possibly polarization and that space had no qualities like slope. He probably would have considered that a Designer of Digital Energy might have set the Universe to occur within a charged field. The premise that empty space itself has no velocity or slope, asymmetric charge or field that would affect the speed of energy or its form as mass is the usual. For all I know (which isn’t much), space alone may have infinite speed characteristics naturally and dimensions could be single quality fields that may intersect to comprise standing wave phenomena for some time before moving off. Or cycling through to some other space-time. The four dimensions of this Universe could be broken off pieces of dimensional fields that remained locked up with the energy-mass consequents from the entry point of digitization.