Taking The Quantum Red Pill… Are We Living in a Simulation?

The research from this year’s Nobel Prize winners may be adding fuel to the fire of whether we might live inside a complex simulation.

If you’ve ever seen The Matrix, or listened to Elon Musk’s musings on the nature of reality, you’ll be familiar with ‘The Simulation Theory’. This idea, that you, me and everything we see is part of a computer simulation, was first presented by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom with his “simulation argument” paper in 2001. It may sound far- fetched, but could the subject of this year’s Nobel Physics Prize provide some evidence?

As Olivia Lang discussed last week, three physicists won the Nobel for their work in quantum entanglement, a phenomenon so strange it was called “spooky” by Einstein. It challenges the idea of locality: that objects are only influenced by their immediate surroundings, and that these influences take time to travel. Put simply, if I shout to you from across a field, it takes time for the sound to travel to your ears. However, with quantum entanglement, the effect between two entangled particles is instantaneous, no matter the distance between them.

But how could this be related to a computer simulation? After all, such a simulation would need an unimaginably powerful computer to run it. It would certainly be a lot more powerful than anything humans have created, although we may share similarity where even our simulations must take certain short-cuts to make them possible to run.

As John Gordon writes in the New Scientist, “when writing a simulator for a game, it is normal not to waste resources simulating details that the player can't see and that aren't immediately relevant.” So, if we have two entangled particles in our simulation, following the “player’s” observation of one the computer program would set the state of both. To us in the simulation, this would appear to break locality. In reality, it is just code setting two variables at the same time.

It’s a compelling idea, but do physicists agree? If they’re anything like Sabine Hossenfelder, the answer is a resounding no. The theoretical physicist explains in her video, “The Simulation Hypothesis is Pseudoscience”,  why she believes Bostrom’s argument falls short. Ultimately, the hypothesis rests on the assumption that it’s possible to run all the natural laws of physics with computer code without any inconsistencies or bugs. Without explaining how this could work, and how the simulation could know which parts of the universe we’re looking at, the idea is just that, an idea.

Perhaps Sabine is missing the point, we don’t know what strange technology a higher being might have that could be capable of such complexity. Perhaps the weirdness of quantum mechanics, and its incompatibility with classical physics, is exactly the kind of inconsistency she’s alluding to.

Her reply would most likely be: “what experiment can we do to prove we’re in a simulation?” If the program is any good, the answer is probably none.