The Universe as a Simulation, the Spy Would Be in Gravity

Gravitational force could be a clue that the universe we live in is a giant computer simulation, says physicist Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth, UK, in a new study published in the journal AIP Advances that appears to support the suggestive hypothesis that has been much debated and supported even by Elon Musk.

"My results in this study are consistent with the idea that the universe might be operating like a giant computer, or that our reality is a simulated construction. Just as computers try to save space and run more efficiently , the universe might do the same . It's a new way of thinking about gravity: not just as a pull, but as something that happens when the universe tries to stay organized."

In an earlier study , Vopson had already argued that information has mass, and that all elementary particles in the universe store information about themselves, just as biological cells have DNA. These elementary particles are the smallest possible units of matter, just as bits are the smallest units of digital information. And these particles , Vopson hypothesized, can be organized into pixels , or cell-like divisions in space-time that, like a bit, can register a value of 1 or 0 depending on whether the pixel contains matter or not.

Gravity , according to Vopson's new paper, can be thought of as a proxy for the pixelation of matter distribution in the universe. " When multiple particles end up in the same pixel, they merge together, so that each pixel contains only one object ," Vopson notes. "This triggers the gravitational force due to the rules set in the computational system, which require minimizing information content and, by extension, reducing computing power. Simply put, it is much more computationally efficient to track and calculate the position and momentum of a single object in space than of numerous objects. Therefore, it appears that gravitational attraction is just another optimization mechanism in a computational process that has the role of compressing information ." Following this analogy, the pixel is the Zip file while gravity is the compressive force that optimizes the amount of space it takes up.