According to This Physicist's Calculations, We Are Indeed Living in a Computer Simulation

What if we're just puppets in a vast simulation? At least, that's what one physicist thinks he's proved.

From The Matrix to Elon Musk, the idea that the universe in which we live is nothing more than a vast machination, a simple line of code inscribed in a giant computer, is not new. It's even gaining ground in the scientific community, and this time, one scientist thinks he has proof.

Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in England, is investigating the possibility that the universe is a digital simulation. While this isn't the first time a scientist has pondered the question, Melvin Vopson is the first to go this far. For several years now, he has been formulating hypotheses in favor of the existence of an artificial reality and trying to prove them.

His scientific arguments are a little complex but are based on the idea that the matter that accumulates in the world carries within it "information" that is optimized. In 2019, the physicist posited in his model that information has "a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information." This discovery adds to the pre-existing principle that information has a physical mass. This formulation of "a new principle of mass-energy-information equivalence" is, in his view, the foundation of the universe. With this new principle, Melvin Vopson put forward the idea that all elementary particles in the universe store information in the same way that human DNA stores genomes. 

Building on this first publication, he proposed a new law in 2022, called the "second law of information dynamics" or "infodynamics," which runs counter to a law already validated by the scientific community: the second law of thermodynamics. The latter "stipulates that the entropy—which measures the degree of disorganization—of any system remains constant and increases with time." According to the physicist's research, the "second law of infodynamics requires that the entropy of information remains constant or decreases with time." In simpler terms, this means there is a "compensation" mechanism that acts so this new law does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. This "dissipation mechanism" would explain why information can be considered a new form of matter, playing a role in the stable expansion of the universe.

This new law could lead to the first evidence in favor of the artificial reality hypothesis, according to Vopson. The universe is said to have a digital nature due to its ability to "optimize and compress data," and this could be proven by a decrease in entropy in information systems over time.

To carry out further research, Melvin Vopson launched a £195,000 (approx. $240,000) crowdfunding campaign, which was halted before the desired sum was raised. He hopes one day to be able to carry out experiments designed to prove his hypotheses, and perhaps put his finger on what seems to be the imagination of a mad scientist... or that of the Wachowski sisters, directors of The Matrix film.