How can we check whether we live in the real world or are a product of virtual reality created by our distant descendants.
Three theoretical physicists from the United States and the United Kingdom have proposed a way to test whether we live in the real world or are a product of virtual reality created by our distant descendants.
They posted their work on the arXiv.org preprint site. This portal is highly respected: it is a collection of unreferenced scientific articles and drafts of future publications in peer-reviewed journals. Almost everyone can publish their ideas in it, so there it is quite possible to stumble upon outright nonsense. But mostly articles signed by serious authors are published on this portal, and these articles are then very vividly discussed in the scientific community. Serious scientific journals always put their future publications through a sieve of experts, but experts can fall prey to prejudice, so arXiv is a way, albeit not very reliable, to break through this wall and say something loud to the whole world, as was the case with superluminal neutrinos.
It’s even strange how often ideas borrowed from science fiction have recently migrated into science. Suffice it to recall the Multiverse - the idea of many parallel universes that has settled in scientific journals since the fifties of the last century; or, as it were, borrowed from the Strugatskys' novel “A Billion Years Before the End of the World,” the idea that the Universe watches from the future so that a person does not commit any actions that are undesirable to her.
The idea gained popularity during the period of multiple troubles with the Large Hadron Collider, sometimes the most bizarre, which happened as if someone had deliberately adjusted them.
The Dane Holger Nielsen, one of the authors of this idea and, by the way, one of the fathers of today's famous string theory, then told the author of these lines that this is "a normal physical model that does not contradict anything that we know about the world", and that he had not heard anything about the work of the Strugatsky brothers. According to this model, the Higgs boson can be detected, but the nature will not give such a chance. And since the Higgs boson seems to have been discovered, this beautiful model, despite all its normality, does not work.
People have been talking about our virtual origin for a long time - Plato began, and in the last century the idea was picked up by science fiction writers. In 2003, scientists started talking about it. Then Nick Bostrom, a philosopher from Oxford, published an article in which he stated that the chances of humanity to reach the technological level of what he called "post-humanity" are close to zero, but if this level is achieved, then we are almost certainly a "computer simulation" of our own descendants from the distant future.
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One of the provisions of this article sounded like this: "We live in a computer simulation."
Washington State University physics professor Martin Savage, along with fellow graduate students Zore Davoodi and Silas Bean from the University of New Hampshire, decided to find a way to test this hypothesis. They proceeded from the existing methods of computer modeling of processes occurring in the world of elementary particles. All these methods have one thing in common - the computer processes a four-dimensional (three spatial dimensions plus one temporal) lattice of quantum states, and, according to the authors, it can hardly be replaced by something else. In the course of their theoretical research, they found that today our world can be described in this way only in a very small volume, not exceeding one hundredth of one trillionth of a meter in size, and this is slightly larger than the size of an atomic nucleus.
The development of technology, of course, can increase this size by many orders of magnitude, and, indeed, in the very distant future (if humanity survives) it will be possible to create a computer model of the Universe.
However, the presence of this model, the researchers say, can be detected by observing high-energy cosmic rays. Since the lattice of quantum states is not a continuum, an elementary particle, running along the diagonal of a square cell of this lattice, will travel a greater distance than skipping between points along the edge of this cell. This means that, in principle, space should not be isotropic, that is, cosmic rays should behave differently in different directions. And if such anisotropy is found, it will mean that we are the fruits of a complex computer program.
Jim Kakalios, professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, commenting on this work, states that this future experiment will prove nothing.
If a non-isotropic “signature” of the space is not found, he says, this does not mean that we are not the fruits of computer modeling: descendants will be able to use completely different methods of modeling than they are today. If non-isotropy is found, it will only mean that space-time has features that we did not suspect earlier.
However, all scientists who deal with this problem note that, regardless of whether we are real or virtual, this has no effect on our life.
Vladimir Pokrovsky