Ask Ethan: Could the Universe be a simulation?
“We take for granted, every day, that what we perceive as “real” is actually reflective of some type of objective reality. That the atoms and molecules composing our bodies actually exist; that the photons interacting with us possess energy and momentum; that the neutrinos passing through us are bona fide quantum particles. But perhaps the Universe, from the tiniest subatomic particles to the largest collections of galaxies, doesn’t exist as a physical entity, but merely as a simulation in some other, truer reality.”
If you possessed a computer with enough power, you could conceivably simulate the entire Universe. From the inception of the Big Bang, you could compute the positions and momenta of every particle and every interaction over time, across all 13.8 billion years. If your simulation was good enough, you could even account for quantum processes and uncertainty, and you’d wind up with planets, life, and even human brains at the end. But if this were representative of our reality, would there be any way to tell? Maybe computational short-cuts would show up as some sort of fundamental blurriness at small enough scale. And what would that tell us about our quest to understand the fundamental constants, particles and interactions that define our Universe? Would it all be futile? Perhaps there would still be something important to learn about our existence by asking the right fundamental questions through experiments.
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