For many years now we've understood how to tell if we're living in a computer simulation: You reach out and touch the nearest mirror. If it gloops onto you and starts taking over your body, boom, confirmed, you are in the Matrix.
But one scientist believes he's found proof that's a bit more, well, commonplace:
Dr. Melvin Vopson, an associate professor in physics at the University of Portsmouth in the UK, believes that gravity is a sign that we are living in a virtual simulation and the universe is the 'ultimate computer,' he alleged in a new paper.
That's right:
Apparently the inexorable pull of all particles toward each other at the macroscopic level, a universal constant, is proof that we're living in a computer game.
Dr. Vopson believes that gravity is not a fundamental force but rather "something that occurs when the universe is trying to keep its data organized."
From the paper:
Using the second law of information dynamics and the mass - energy - information equivalence principle, we show that gravitational attraction manifests as a requirement to reduce the information entropy of matter objects in space. This is another example of data compression and computational optimization in our universe, which supports the possibility of a simulated or computational universe.
Not sure why the universe can't just use a standard-issue GUI like the rest of us!
I know when I need to organize my data, I don't generally create a 13-billion-light-year-wide simulation and fabricate a fundamental interaction in order to keep everything together. But that's just me!
This guy's serious, though:
'The universe evolves in a way that the information content in it is compressed, optimized and organized - just as computers and computer code do,' he told the Daily Mail. 'Hence, gravity appears to be another process of data compression in a possibly simulated universe.'
Well, if I ever wake up from this program, I'll surely be interested to see how the universe actually holds itself together!
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