Are we living in a computer simulation? This physicist says his study supports the theory

What if everything we experience in the world was nothing more than an elaborate simulated reality?

The simulation hypothesis isn’t a novel idea and it’s enjoyed some mainstream appeal through movies like The Matrix and high-profile proponents like Elon Musk.

Now a physicist working at the University of Portsmouth in the UK has published research in the AIP Advances journal that he says provides support to the strange theory.

“I don’t want to paraphrase Morpheus from The Matrix but he said ‘what is real?'” the Associate Professor of Physics, Dr Melvin Vopson, said.

“All the senses that we have, they’re just electrical signals that are being decoded by our brains. What this is is a biological computer. There’s nothing more,” he added.

Dr Vopson’s work belongs to a branch of science known as information physics which posits that everything in the universe is fundamentally made up of bits of information.

According to Dr Vopson’s 2nd Law of Infodynamics, or information dynamics, information content associated with any system, event or process in the universe is minimised.

The physicist first noticed this behaviour while studying COVID genome mutations. Contrary to Darwinian consensus, Dr Vopson observed that these mutations are not random and always result in a reduction in entropy which is the measure of disorder in an isolated system.

This would contradict the second law of thermodynamics, a central tenet of scientific thinking, which establishes that entropy can only increase or stay the same.

“The second law of information dynamics requires all systems, including biological life, to evolve in a way that their information entropy and information content, if you want, shrinks and is reduced to the optimal, most optimal possible value at equilibrium,” he said.

“It’s compressed in a way that is exactly what computers do in computer programs,” he added.

Dr Vopson believes that his findings could have implications for several different scientific disciplines, including biology, physics and cosmology.

“If this is a law that refers to computational processes and information itself, and the universe does this in everything, it seems to, even biological life, perhaps the universe really works as a giant computer,” Vopson said.

Vopson says that because the behaviour follows the rules of computer coding, and that the second law of infodynamics appears to manifest universally, and is, in fact, a cosmological necessity, this could suggest that the entire universe appears to be a simulated construct.

Dr Vopson’s previous research indicated that information is the fundamental building block of the universe and has physical mass and should be regarded as the fifth state of matter.

His paper argues that the second law of infodynamics supports this principle, potentially validating the idea that information is a physical entity, equivalent to mass and energy – and even suggests information could be the elusive dark matter in the universe.

“If information has mass, as I postulated in the Mass – Energy – Information Equivalence Principle, the question is how much information you need out there to make up for all the missing dark matter. And I gave a number. It’s 10 to the power 93, bits of information at 2.73 Kelvin temperature. It would make up for all the missing dark matter, all of it,” Vopson explained.

“What is this, all this missing stuff? The 95 per cent of the universe that we cannot find, we cannot see. Well, that’s the code. Maybe, that is the code that runs the simulation,” he said.

Vopson is now crowdfunding further research that will try to detect and measure the information in an elementary particle by using particle-antiparticle collision, hoping to prove or disprove his theories.

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Video editor • Aisling Ní Chúláin