the universe as a virtual reality

thick fog blankets the city . . . . i wore my clear sunglasses (is that an oxymoron?) on my bike today as i needed to see but also needed protection from the road grit and slop that was flying everywhere. i walked in the door splatter-painted with mud, sand, salt, snowmelt, and whatever else is on the roads right now. it's likely going to be a one week wonder as i have no doubt the temperatures will drop and winter will return but it's so nice to get on two wheels again.

now imagine if you will that after riding home, setting up dinner, helping my son with his math homework, unloading my pannier bags, and getting changed into dry clothes i opened up the inbox and an abstract was waiting there suggesting that this whole reality thing that i think i am a part of, might in fact be a virtual reality construct. information theorists would find that easy to sleep on. after all, everything is information right.

this is the stuff of the matrix.

so read this for a sort of current history of our knowing of this universe.


then read this, 'cause this is the abstract for what's about to be shared:

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine"
Sir Arthur Eddington

Abstract

"This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical,as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter."

if you're intrigued then here's the link.