If it's true, this work could have ramifications for some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, including learning where we came from.
From ancient Greek philosopher Plato to Neo, hero of the dystopian film fantasy The Matrix, humans have long pondered the true nature of reality. Can we trust what we see, taste, touch, smell, and hear, to be real -- or have we not truly grasped "how deep the rabbit hole goes?"
The most modern formulation of this idea is the simulation hypothesis, the concept that what we perceive as reality is actually a hyper-realistic, uber-sophisticated simulation likely designed by beings unfathomably more advanced than our own. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom first put this idea into words back in 2003, and since then, the hypothesis has gathered some notable adherents. However, there's a wide chasm between philosophy and proven science -- and to get there, you need to build a bridge of evidence.
For the past six years, Melvin Vopson, Ph.D., a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. -- has been trying to construct this crucial piece of empirical infrastructure. His latest addition to the idea revealed a potential new role for gravity. In a paper he published in AIP Advances in April, Vopson explores the idea that gravitational attraction effectively reduces information entropy -- in other words, it enforces computational order on information chaos.
Entropy is a measure of disorder in an isolated system. For example, if you have a well-ordered room, it has low entropy. But over time, the room becomes messier, without expending energy to keep it neat. Its increasing disorganization indicates a rise in entropy. This idea extends to information, Vopson says, but inversely.
"If you take an area of space with some objects in it, they will have information entropy associated with this information," Vopson says. That information registers the properties of matter in space, such as velocity and position. Information has a really tiny mass, but it's enough to be measurable, according to the paper. But if the objects cluster together due to gravity, that information entropy is reduced, and so they will have more order, he says.
If true (and it's a pretty big "if"), Vopson's new gravitational study would shake the foundations of the currently accepted view of the universe. In his paper, he writes that this work could have ramifications for some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, including dark energy, quantum gravity, and black hole thermodynamics.
His new paper pushes science a little bit closer to possibly understanding our simulated universe -- a scientific pursuit that took Vopson by complete surprise. Having a deep background in condensed matter physics and digital data storage, Vopson once worked on the full-spectrum of digital storage technologies as a senior research and development scientist at Seagate, a U.S. data storage company.
He didn't intend to study the simulated universe idea. "It was completely out of my reasoning," Vopson says. "All of this work in condensed matter physics and data storage, it shaped up my thinking and understanding of digital technology and information...the reason I was able to do this was I was at the right time at the right place."
That time arrived in 2019, when Vopson -- inspired by the work of computer scientist Claude Shannon, the father of information theory -- developed his mass-energy-information-equivalence principle. Soon he followed it with his "Second Law of Infodynamics." It's a title he admits is a bit ambitious. While the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the entropy -- or disorder -- of any system remains constant or increases over time, the concept of information turns that law on its head.
"The Second Law of Information Dynamics requires information entropy to decrease, it requires less computational power, and less data storage," Vopson says, adding, "I was a bit too brave. I postulated with a collaborator of mine that this is a universal law, but I only gave two examples...since then, all my efforts were geared toward finding other systems where this is valid."
That drive to find supporting evidence for his presumptuously declared "law" of the universe is what actually led Vopson into the scientific realm of the simulation hypothesis. Alongside the introduction of his second law, his exploration first bore fruit in 2022 -- because of the Covid-19 pandemic. After analyzing the readily available data related to the mutations of the SARS-CoV-2, the microscopic menace behind the pandemic, Vopson determined that when the virus mutated, information entropy decreased. According to Vopson, if the universe was a super-sophisticated simulation, it would require built-in optimization and compression to reduce complexity. So perhaps these genetic mutations are evidence of that optimization at work, since mutations appeared to decrease information entropy.
Vopson's concept draws on Shannon's information theory and also the German-American physicist Rolf Landauer's proposed connection between thermodynamics and information. In this new paper, Vopson applies his hypothesis to the concept of "entropic gravity," an idea first explored in 2011 by Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde. The basic concept is that gravity isn't a fundamental force but an emergent phenomenon. Deeper processes, perhaps one like the Second Law of Infodynamics, are what give rise to gravity, Vopson argues.
Despite six years of these kinds of rapid-fire bold claims, Vopson is very aware that his ideas are far from certain. He's the first to mention that many of his studies' titles contain question marks, and that he often writes disclaimers in his conclusions that the simulation hypothesis is just that -- a hypothesis. So far, he says, he has gotten surprisingly little pushback for his ideas, but he welcomes any and all criticism.
His ultimate mission is to expand humanity's knowledge in any way possible -- even if that means definitively proving that our universe is the real deal.
"We have a public duty to publish results, publish ideas, bring them into the public domain so we can debate them, so we can disprove them," Vopson says. "Otherwise we won't make any progress."