In the blockbuster movie The Matrix, protagonist Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, discovers we’re living in a simulated reality hundreds of years from now.
While many of us take comfort in the fact this concept is consigned to science fiction, a researcher claims it may actually be true.
Melvin Vopson, an associate professor in physics at the University of Portsmouth, claims we may be characters in an advanced virtual world.
He claims that the physical behaviour of information in our universe resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing code – a clue that perhaps the machines hope we don’t notice.
Professor Vopson has already warned of an impending ‘information catastrophe’, when we run out of energy to sustain huge amounts of digital information.
My studies point to a bizarre and interesting possibility that we don’t live in an objective reality and that the entire universe might be just a super advanced virtual reality simulation,’ Professor Vopson said.
Last year, the academic – from Romania – established a new law of physics, called the ‘second law of information dynamics’ to explain how information behaves.
His law establishes that the ‘entropy’, or disorder, in a system of information decreases rather than increases.
This new law came as somewhat of a surprise, because it’s the opposite of the second law of thermodynamics established in the 1850s, which explains why we cannot unscramble an egg or why a glass cannot unbreak itself.
As it turns out, the second law of infodynamics explains the behaviour of information in a way that the old law cannot.
‘The second law of infodynamics requires the minimisation of the information content associated with any event or process in the universe,’ he told MailOnline.
