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One controversial scientist is doubling down on his theory that we're living in a simulation, More recently, he's even started to say that he can also prove it, if you believe what you read elsewhere. Yes, it is controversial -- his outsider theories take a lot of imagination to believe in, and his studies of interesting real phenomena are couched in circular fallacies about simulation theory. But in the abstract of his papers and his comments, he's also frank about the more speculative nature of his work. So, where's the truth?
A revitalized story on the Daily Mail's MailOnline science section appeared late last week, running the math on a popular (in the 'online discourse' sense) theory of Vopson's -- that time dilation seems possible in a simulation. According to this idea, in the same way that our dreams can feel days long but last only minutes in real life, an entire lifetime in a simulated universe could take just one minute in the real world. That means a person could become virtually immortal by stacking up these one-minute simulated lives across their entire human lifetime, leaving 52 million chained lifetimes behind.
The Daily Mail isn't a science publication, and it's often steeped in controversy as a U.K. tabloid. So, it's easy to try to discredit this story as exaggeration or clickbait. The thing is, Vopson says things like this in his own words in other places as well. He appears on podcasts for skeptics and those who say they question our assumptions, including at least one podcast where he talked about finding evidence for simulation theory in the Bible.
Vopson works at the University of Portsmouth along the southern coast of England. But he has also started his own physics institute, and he self published his 2023 book through that institute. The 2023 paper he released to coincide with that book was published in the "open access mega journal" AIP Advances, and picked up by The Conversation.
These mega journals can electronically publish thousands of articles per year without breaking a sweat, and their peer review standard is lower than at more selective and curated scholarly print journals. They contribute to the crisis of "extreme publishing" in academia, where people can publish ten or more papers in a single year.
In his academic publishing, Vopson focuses on the amount of information he says we can quantify in our universe. His theory is that the way information is organized seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics -- the idea that everything in the world experiences rising entropy, meaning that the level of overall disorder is always increasing. This is essential to the "time's arrow" that pushes events in our universe in a forward direction.
But Vopson believes that information experiences less entropy over time rather than more, and he says his work can prove that. Then, he concludes that this is a way in which we could verify that the data portion of our world is being simulated and organized. If it's breaking physical laws, he postulates, it could be the smoking gun for a simulation.
The mega journals only check for basic scientific rigor, which means that Vopson can't say that he can make rain fall upward from the ground or something, but he can define his own terms and then draw conclusions based on what he's defined. His overall theory is not under scrutiny by a mega journal like the one in which he published.
And it shows in Vopson's circular reasoning. He's cherrypicking one very specific measurement, with terms he has extrapolated like a dead-reckoning navigator, and counting it as evidence of his theory. And it doesn't even really make sense in his own context. Think about it -- some higher intelligence that could manufacture the entire universe wouldn't be so foolish as to leave a giant footprint in the way they handled the data load for us to find.
While Vopson's particular take on simulation theory is more public and far out than some others', he's not alone by any means. Google's Ngram service shows interest in simulation theory leaping in fits and starts (including a giant climb after the release of The Matrix). And while technology is enabling us to probe the universe more deeply and explore challenging ideas, it's also anecdotally true that pop culture influences what people believe or even experience in psychiatric delusions.
Until the rise of under-informed and confused beliefs about things like artificial intelligence and technology accelerationism became mainstream, simulation theory was more of a thought exercise. If you could realize, somehow, that the universe was a simulation, could you violate physics and have superpowers? What does a simulated universe mean about the moral responsibility we have toward our fellow simulated people and the animals and plants of our world?
The thing is, somewhat outsider science ideas have long been able to eventually find more legitimate platforms. Historian Alfred Crosby, who died in 2018 at the age of 87, sought a non-academic publisher for his groundbreaking theory of the Columbian exchange, wherein biodiversity from Europe and America was mingled in a way that massively changed our world. Paleontologist and Ken Burns guest Stephen Jay Gould advanced a new (and now outmoded!) evolutionary theory in his book Wonderful Life, which was a bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominee. Well formed work that passes muster in validity and logic can find a respectable home, even when there's no specific journal or publisher for them yet.
But the ideas of people like Vopson -- who may be totally sincere in his beliefs about simulation, the Bible, his information physics theories, and the rest of what he writes about -- are getting propped up and amplified by extremely wealthy people who have financial incentive to make people feel like they aren't real, don't exist, or must question everything around them every day. There is profit to be made in curating a loss of public trust in institutions, which are then deregulated, destroyed, and replaced with cheaper and less regulated private versions. If you can convince people that they may be living just one of 54 million lifetimes, or that something about this life is an experiment to improve the programming, you can devalue their lived experiences and human rights.
Vopson seems to be, in his work, trying to combine the spiritual ideas of a creator, everlasting life, and unfathomable higher intelligence into something he can try to prove. And he's not alone in that, either. Science and philosophy both originated in people's bewilderment at the world around them, and the seeming cruelty of random events or mysterious illnesses. Vopson has updated intelligent design theory by adding more journal articles to the pile, and he even combs through the Bible looking for language that can be interpreted to support him.
By following ideas like Vopson's brand of simulation theory -- which hold very little logical water on close inspection -- many grand, existential questions are conveniently pushed into a black box of mysteries. Because we don't know the physics and other qualities of the reality where the intelligence is theoretically running our program, the laws of our world can't ever be studied or proven.
Asking questions is the core of science, and propping up ideas that encourage those questions to be left unanswered might not be intentionally malicious, but it also isn't particularly scientific.