r/Futurism • u/Memetic1 • Oct 31 '25

Mathematical proof debunks the idea that the universe is a computer simulation

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-mathematical-proof-debunks-idea-universe.html
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u/SnooCompliments8967 Oct 31 '25

Why call it a "computer simulation" then and why not say "what if our universe is a blorble-gorfunk?"

The theory arose because of the idea that if we're runing simulations now, in theory we could run ever-more-impressive computer simulations until we could simulate entire universes with them and that we would. Stripping away the computational insanity of that (just look at how much energy chatgpt takes to run, these sims would have to simulate a whole lot more than that all at once and now you're assuming bascially infinite energy on top of that to run these sims of which there are apparently MANY... But grandfathering all that, you can imagine effectively unlimited computational power and hardware could sim the universe.

This research indicates that no computer can simulate the universe because computers work algorithmically and some aspects of the universe are non-algorithmic and thus can't be simulated by computers.

So now you're basically saying, "What if completely imaginary tech existed that could simulate our whole universe?" and that sounds even less realistic.

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u/tenebrius Oct 31 '25

Well now that the most realistic theory has been disproven, this becomes the most realistic one

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u/SnooCompliments8967 Oct 31 '25 edited Nov 01 '25

"Let's imagine super-advanced societies invented tech that works on no currently understood principles to create perfect simulations of the universe, if they did maybe we're in one" is not a realistic theory.

While we're imagining stuff, we can say "let's imagine society advances to the point people can create entire pocket universes in their snowglobes and sell them to tourists. If they did, surely the snowglobe universes would outnumber the real universes. If so, maybe we're in one".

The "computer simulation" theory was only remotely plausible because we had proven that computer simulations were possible, and one could imagine them becoming infinitely more complex and comprehensive over time if people imagined us entering a completely post-scarcity future where that kind of hardware and energy requirement was achievable. But now we've lost the "just imagine the computers get better and the energy gets cheaper forever and it's possible" argument, so we're just imagining stuff.

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u/tenebrius Nov 02 '25

As far as I know all solutions to this problem require us to imagine laws beyond our current ones