- Title: Are we living in a computer simulation?
- Date: 2nd November 2023
- Summary: PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND, UK (OCTOBER 13, 2023) (Reuters) (SOUNDBITE) (English) DR MELVIN VOPSON, UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH, SAYING: "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. It'
- Embargoed: 16th November 2023 09:34
- Keywords: 2nd Law of Information Dynamics Is the universe a simulation? Professor Melvin Vopson University of Portsmouth simulation theory
- Location: PORTSMOUTH & LONDON, ENGLAND, UK / IN SPACE / TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA / COLOGNE, GERMANY
- City: PORTSMOUTH & LONDON, ENGLAND, UK / IN SPACE / TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA / COLOGNE, GERMANY
- Country: UK
- Topics: Europe,Science
- Reuters ID: LVA00D040116102023RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: A new study supports the weird idea that we are all living in a computer simulation, a theory that could have implications for science and technology, according to physicist at the University of Portsmouth.
The work, by Dr Melvin Vopson, an Associate Professor of Physics and published in AIP Advances, suggests the universe behaves just like a computer in ordering and deleting unnecessary information, a sign he says that reality could be a construct.
“I don't want to paraphrase Morpheus from The Matrix but he said 'what is real?' Dr Vopson told Reuters.
"All the senses that we have, they're just electrical signals that are being decoded by our brains. What is this is a biological computer. There's nothing more," he said, pointing to his head.
The simulated universe hypothesis has some high-profile supporters, including Elon Musk, and within a branch of science known as information physics, which suggests everything is fundamentally made up of bits of information.
Dr Vopson's 2nd Law of Infodynamics, or information dynamics, essentially minimizes the information content associated with any system, event or process in the universe and may have implications for several different scientific disciplines, including biology, physics and cosmology and even philosophy.
He says he spotted the behaviour accidentally when studying Covid genome mutations and realised that contrary to the Darwinian consensus, they are not random and always result in a reduction in entropy - a measure of disorder in an isolated system.
This contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, a central tenet of scientific thinking, which establishes that entropy can only increase or stay the same.
"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 be manifesting universally, and is, in fact, a cosmological necessity, we could conclude that this points to the fact that the entire universe appears to be a simulated construct.
"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. It's compressed in a way that is exactly what computers do in computer programmes," he said.
Dr Vopson's previous research suggests that information is the fundamental building block of the universe and has physical mass and should be regarded as the fifth state of matter.
The paper argues the second law of infodynamics lends support to 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 said.
"What is this, all this missing stuff? The 95% 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 currently crowdfunding to 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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