The German physicist is preparing to conduct an experiment to find out if we are living in simulation.
German physicist Melvin Vopson, who works at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, is preparing to scientifically test the idea that the universe may actually be a simulation.
According to the news in Independent Turkish, Vopson started to collect donations to cover the necessary expenses for the experiment. The scientist, who started the campaign with the aim of obtaining 219 thousand dollars, was able to collect only a thousand dollars for now. Vopson took simulation theory at The Conversation to tell people the purpose of the experiment and how it could be done, and explained the method he thought would prove it.
WHAT IS SIMULATION THEORY?
The simulation theory roughly means that this universe is actually a computer program designed by other living things. The theory is, “How did life originate in the universe?” It stands up to the question.
One of the greatest mysteries of the scientific world is how the complex conditions and chain of events required for the development of life on Earth and thus in the universe could emerge.
Some physicists believe that the multiverse theory can answer this question. Accordingly, assuming that there are many universes like ours, it is not surprising that the necessary conditions have arisen in at least one of them.
On the other hand, some scientists give a completely different answer to this question: The universe may be a simulation where someone is tweaking the computer.
The second option, according to Vopson, falls within the domain of a science called information physics. This means that physical reality is actually made up of “bits of information that reveal our experience of space-time.”
Vopson explains it this way in his article in The Conversation:
In 1989, the legendary physicist John Archibald Wheeler said that the universe is fundamentally mathematical and may have arisen from knowledge. So he invented the famous aphorism from ‘lice’.
The smallest and most basic unit that stores information in computer language is called a bit.
Saying, “We know that an overloaded processor slows down computer operations,” the scientist explains the theory with an example from Einstein:
Similarly, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity shows that time slows down near the black hole.
EVERY PIECE OF INFORMATION MUST HAVE A FINITE AND MEASURABLE MASS
Vopson put forward a theory based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 2019. According to this theory, every piece of information must have a finite and measurable mass.
For example, a hard disk loaded with information must weigh more than a blank version of the same disk. On the other hand, since this mass difference corresponds to a very small change, it has not been possible to measure it with the available possibilities and thus to prove the physicist’s theory until now.
Vopson, on the other hand, thinks it is possible to prove this theory in the near future. Two assumptions stand out in the experiment, which the physicist has designed only on paper for now.
The first is the main assumption that information also has mass.
According to the second assumption, all elementary particles store information content about them, similar to how living things are encoded by DNA. In other words, each electron carries information.
Based on this second assumption, Vopson wants to collide matter with antimatter (aka, electron with positron):
All particles have ‘counter’ versions of themselves that are the same but with opposite charge. These are called antimatter. In a burst of energy, these two substances annihilate each other by emitting ‘photons’, that is, lighter particles.
Vopson thinks that when these particles are destroyed, information will remain. He states that this information will turn into low-energy infrared photons, and he can prove this with the experiment:
Based on information physics, I calculated the full range of frequencies that the resulting photons are expected to have. It is very possible to do this experiment with our current tools.
“The bits are the codes of the simulation”
Claiming that information is the 5th state of matter with this theory, Vopson says, “I even calculated the expected information content per elementary particle. I based the experimental protocol on this.”
It is reasonable to assume that a simulated universe will contain lots of information bits everywhere. These bits of information represent the codes of the simulation. Therefore, detecting lice will prove the simulation hypothesis.
In another article he wrote based on this theory, Vopson claimed that every post and every message shared on social media actually increases the weight of the Earth.
Stating that he could prove both ideas with the same experiment, the physicist said, “The information in an electron is 22 million times smaller than its mass. We can only measure the information by deleting the electron.”
When you collide a matter particle with an antimatter particle, they annihilate each other. We know this. When the particle disappears, this information has to go somewhere.