Recently, the physicist Melvin Vopson from the University of Portsmouth has investigated whether a new law of physics could support this widely discussed theory. His current study explores the simulated universe hypothesis and the implications for science and technology.
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Simulation could be our reality
The idea, essentially a mental exercise, has gained popularity among several prominent personalities, including Elon Musk. It belongs to the field of information physics, a discipline that postulates that physical reality is made up mainly of fundamental units of information, known as bits.
In previous work, Vopson had already proposed that information has mass and that all elementary particles store information about themselves, just like human DNA. In 2022, Vopson claimed to have discovered a new physical law that could predict genetic mutations in organisms, including viruses, and help evaluate their possible consequences.
Infodynamics: the second law of information dynamics
As explained in a statement from the University of Portsmouth, this discovery is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, a measure of disorder in an isolated system, implies a loss of energy so it always increases or remains constant. in any natural process in the Universe.
However, Vopson, who considers information as a form of matter, expected the entropy of information systems to also increase over time, but observed that entropy remained constant or decreasedwhich led him to propose the second law of information dynamics, or infodynamics, according to a new article published in AIP Physics.
According to Vopson, this discovery facilitates new research at the intersection of physics and information and appears to support the simulated universe hypothesis.
In the realm of genetics, Vopson found that the second law of infodynamics challenges the conventional interpretation of genetic mutations, suggesting that they follow a pattern governed by information entropy, rather than being merely random.
The theory also addresses the organization of electrons in an atomnoting that they minimize information entropy, implying that for the Universe to continue expanding, the increase in physical entropy must be balanced by a corresponding decrease in information entropy.
Prevalence of symmetry in the universe
Vopson explains that his research also sheds light on the prevalence of symmetry in the universe, relating it to the second law of infodynamics and highlighting how information systems eliminate information considered superfluous.
In fact, this concept can be visualized as a computer that self-optimizes and compresses, which, according to him, supports the possibility that we are all immersed in an information system which operates in this way, essentially, a simulation.
“Principles of symmetry play an important role in the laws of nature, but until now there have been few explanations for why this might be the case. My findings show that high symmetry corresponds to the state of lowest informational entropy, which could explain nature’s inclination towards it,” says Vopson.
“This approach, in which excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer removing or compressing residual code to save storage space and optimize energy consumption. And as a result it supports the idea that we live in a simulation,” he adds.
