The universe could not be a simulation, physicist says

any people are convinced the universe is fake. Either we’re in a simulation or we’re virtual brains in a virtual vat. In the first case, everything we see and feel is part of some bad movie; in the second, everything we think is also part of a movie and we’re programmed to think it’s real.

What evidence is there for this?

• Hamburgers keep getting smaller (a clear violation of the principle of conservation of matter).

• Politicians always do the exact opposite of what they promise.

• If you leave the room even for an instant while cooking dinner, your food burns instantly (the Zeno effect).

• Your coat falls off the chair only when you’re far enough away that you can’t catch it. (The more the universe can screw you, the more likely it is to happen.) If that’s not proof that it's fake, I don’t know what is.

One reason to think the whole thing is fake comes from quantum mechanics, which tells us everything is quantized, including all matter, energy, and space. If they weren’t, it would mean that it would require an infinite amount of information to simulate it. Physicist Paul Davies estimated that quantum mechanics means the universe contains 10¹²² bits.

If you search for contradictions in the universe, you won’t find them. That in itself is suspicious: if the world were real, there’d be unresolved contradictions all over the place.

Another proof we’re in a simulation would be that who- or whatever is running the simulation would periodically send us bogus ‘proofs’ that the world is really real. Just recently we got a new one^[1].

The new paper

The author assumes one bit of information per Planck area, which is the smallest possible size. The famous Holographic Principle tells us that entropy in any 3D space is equal to its surface area divided by four. Entropy is information, so the universe contains between 2.0 and 3.5×10¹²⁴ bits, close (by physics standards) to Davies’s estimate of 10¹²². This equates to 8.98×10¹⁰⁸ ergs, which is a lot, the author says, so it’s impossible.

Well, the author says, maybe only the Earth exists and those twinkly bits up there are fake. If so, the amount of energy just to simulate the Earth is 2.55×10⁵⁹ ergs, which is about the same as the potential binding energy of the halo of our galaxy. After only a million time steps the amount of energy needed would be equivalent to the entire rest-mass energy of the Milky Way. Even a low-res simulation, which only creates the full details of those things we observe, would need 4.35×10³⁵ ergs, which is still a lot.

If the universe is being simulated in every detail down to the quark scale, it means that for all practical purposes the world is as it appears to be, i.e. it’s real. The author is saying it would take more energy to simulate it than it contains. But of course this is a circular argument: The whole idea is that the universe is not as it appears to be. He’s assuming his own conclusion.

The fact that this argument is so easy to demolish could mean we’re in trouble: if the Great Computer is making such a simple error, maybe it’s about to crash.

The bi-universe theory

One possibility I discussed earlier is that there could be two universes, each of which contains a simulation of the other. It sounds impossible, but it’s not: universe A could have lots of detail but only one present moment, while universe B is tiny but exists for a long time. In this theory, we’re just in a giant screen saver, time is in a loop, and it’s impossible in principle to know what’s really happening. This happens all the time in science fiction.

The author considers this by noting that characters in Pac-Man would be so intellectually limited they’d never figure out what the real world is like. This, he says, is beyond the bounds of his proof: the simulation hypothesis only works in cases where it can be falsified.

Way too convenient! Talk about a dead giveaway.

There are many other ways the Great Computer could deceive us. It could save space by making only a hundred or so different atoms, by erasing the past, or by creating space and time only as needed. Young Earth creationists are familiar with this argument. How do we know, they ask, that dinosaurs were real? Maybe some deity just put those fossilized bones there and changed the decay rate of radio­iso­topes to deceive us. Our memories of what we did three seconds ago were merely planted there. In a world run by Descartes’s mischievous deity, anything is possible.

How do we know space exists everywhere and not just in our local vicinity? And setting a maximum speed limit to prevent us from hopping from one side of the universe to the other, many have argued, is a dead giveaway.

And notice: these things are true. There is indeed only one present moment. The past indeed no longer exists, as far as anyone can measure. There is an ultimate speed limit. All elementary particles of a given type are identical, as if there’s only a single electron zipping back and forth in time.

The Great Computer might have even sneakier tricks. It would know, for instance, when somebody comes up with an infallible argument. If so, the person would instantly

aug 22 2026, 7:45 am