One of nature’s most familiar forces might be doing something far stranger than we ever imagined.
From ancient Greek philosopher Plato to Neo, hero of the dystopian film fantasy The Matrix, humans have long pondered the true nature of reality. Can we trust what we see, taste, touch, smell, and hear to be real—or have we not truly grasped “how deep the rabbit hole goes?”
The most modern formulation of this existential thought exercise is the simulation hypothesis. It suggests that what we perceive as reality is actually a hyper-realistic, uber-sophisticated simulation designed by beings that are far more advanced than us—in unfathomable ways. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom first put this idea into words back in 2003, and since then, the hypothesis has gathered attention from some of the greatest scholars alive. However, there’s a wide chasm between philosophy and proven science, and to prove such a controversial hypothesis, you need to build a bridge of evidence.
For the past six years, Melvin Vopson, PhD, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., has been trying to construct this crucial piece of empirical infrastructure. His latest addition to the simulation hypothesis revealed a potential new role for gravity. In a paper he published in AIP Advances in April, Vopson explores the idea that gravitational attraction effectively reduces information entropy—in other words, it enforces computational order on information chaos.
Entropy is a measure of disorder in an isolated system. For example, if you have a neat bedroom, it has low entropy. But over time, if your room becomes messier because you aren’t expending energy to tidy it up, its increasing disorganization indicates a rise in entropy. This idea extends to information, Vopson says, but inversely.
“If you take an area of space with some objects in it, they will have information entropy associated with this information,” Vopson says. That information registers the properties of matter in space, such as velocity and position. Information has a really tiny mass, but it’s enough to be measurable, according to the paper. But if the objects cluster together due to gravity, that information entropy is reduced, so the objects will have more order, he says.
If true (and it’s a pretty big “if”), Vopson’s new gravitational study would shake the foundations of the currently accepted view of the universe. In his paper, Vopson writes that his new work could have ramifications for some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, including dark energy, quantum gravity, and black hole thermodynamics.
The new paper also pushes science a bit closer to an understanding of a simulated universe—something that took Vopson by complete surprise. Having a deep background in condensed matter physics and digital data storage, Vopson once worked on the full-spectrum of digital storage technologies as a senior research and development scientist at Seagate, a U.S. data storage company. He didn’t intend to study the simulated universe idea.
“It was completely out of my reasoning,” Vopson says. “All of this work in condensed matter physics and data storage, it shaped up my thinking and understanding of digital technology and information … the reason I was able to do this was I was at the right time at the right place.”
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