If you have some memories of the high school philosophy program, perhaps you remember “the allegory of the cave”. Exhibited by Plato at the beginning of IVe A century BC, this assumes that what we think is reality could just as easily be a simple projection of it, like a dancing shadow on the walls of a cave.
In the line of Plato, in 2003, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, advanced the idea that it was likely that what humans perceive as reality is an ultra-advanced simulation, created by beings endowed with almost infinite technological capacities. During the decades that followed, scientists wondered about how we could discover evidence of this “matrix”, even to escape it completely. According to Popular Mechanics, the physicist Melvin Vopson, of the University of Portsmouth, is on an original track.
To prove the existence of said simulation, many researchers focus on finding a flaw in the latter. Melvin Vopson, on the other hand, says that the search for a kind of “source code” of the universe could provide a more convincing path to prove our artificial existence.
The “second law of infodynamics”
According to Melvin Vopson, the code would be more precisely what it calls the “second law of infodynamics”. This stipulates that the entropy of the information “Must remain constant or decrease over time, up to a minimum value at equilibrium”he wrote in an article of 2023 for The Conversation. Note that entropy is a physical quantity that characterizes the degree of disorganization of a system.
In this same article, the researcher then explains that this law can apply to the behavior of genetic information, which would therefore not be random as Charles Darwin suggests, but who would always seek to minimize the entropy of information. In the same way, the universe would therefore tend towards symmetry rather than asymmetry, thus acting as a kind of optimization or program of program “Optimal data compression”.
Although this argument is intriguing, Melvin Vopson maintains that the second law of infodynamics, as well as the hypothesis of simulation, requires further research to achieve final conclusions. Many scientists remain very skeptical, some affirming that this idea is similar to pseudoscience, even a form of religion.
