It's primarily a humorous quip people make to cope with the absurdity of the world we currently inhabit. However, what if it were actually possible?
In fact, researchers from the UK have put forward a new law of physics that might ascertain whether we are indeed residing within a simulation or not.
From USA Today:
As far back as 1999, Morpheus was entering "The Matrix" to break Neo and a few other chosen few out of a simulated reality created by advanced machines in order to use humans as an energy source. But as the idea permeates not just the realm of science fiction and popular culture, but academia as well, every now and then a philosopher or physicist has something new to say about it.
That's what happened this week when a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom proposed that a new law of physics could support the theory that what we see as our reality is in fact a complex virtual simulation running on a cosmic computer. The theory stems from previous research that Dr. Melvin Vopson has conducted looking into whether information has mass.
"Any normal person will think, could it be that maybe we already are in some kind of digital virtual reality world?" Vopson said in a March video posted on the university's YouTube channel.
"It's not farfetched to assume that an advanced civilization or maybe ourselves in the future, we reach the technological level where we can simulate our world or the whole universe and it's indistinguishable from the reality."
The idea that the cosmos runs on quantum codes has existed for years, becoming popularized in academia in 2003 when philosopher Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford wrote an influential paper about the simulation argument.
Honestly, all of these physics and math equations are going way over my head, but whether we are indeed living in a simulation or not, I personally would rather remain blissfully ignorant to that reality.
