504: DEEP DIVE: Simulation Theory - Evidence is Everywhere
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Is this reality? Well, we're experiencing something right now, so maybe the better question is, what is reality? Could everything we see, everything we experience, everything that exists in our entire universe be artificial? Supporters of simulation theory think that not only is it possible that we're living in a simulation, it's likely. And the more we look for evidence, the more we find. Let's find out why. ♪

The idea the universe is a simulation is not a new one. Similar theories exist in ancient cultures around the world. According to many, we walk the predetermined path created by some higher power. Replace the word path with program and you get simulation theory. Except the higher power in simulation theory is someone or a group of someones controlling how our program behaves.

Deities, aliens, men in black, even YouTube hosts may just be parts of a program overseeing you and controlling how you perceive reality. Sound a little bit like The Matrix?

Well, not quite because unlike the Matrix, in this simulation we aren't just humans plugged into a computer, but consciousness bound within code. We're all parts of a program that are designed to think that we're not parts of a program. As soon as someone turns off the power, everyone stops existing at the same time. Turn the power back on and we're all back and don't even know the difference. Now modern simulation theory comes from Nick Bostrom, a philosopher

a philosopher at Oxford who wrote an influential paper on the subject in 2003. Philosophers like Aristotle and Plato thought philosophy should mainly concern itself with death and, well, they'd probably enjoy Bostrom's work.

Bostrom grapples with, well, we'll call them fun topics like how unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe and existential risks, analyzing human extinction scenarios and related hazards. Bostrom applies both rhetorical and analytical techniques to ponder the big questions like what is the nature of reality? What comes after death? How long can civilization last?

Bostrom lays out simulation theory in a research paper. He then uses statistics to show just how likely it is that we're living in a simulation. Assuming that we can live in a simulation, he presents the simulation trilemma, which says one of the following must be true.

1. We destroy ourselves before we're able to create a simulation. 2. We are able to create a simulation but choose not to. 3. We are definitely in a simulation. Bostrom believes each outcome has about a 20-50% chance. Now on the low end, that's a 1 in 5 chance we might be living in a simulation, and that's pretty high.

Bostrom says these statistics come from the fact that we simply can't know the information about a simulation if we're in one. Now, personally, I don't think the possibility of us living in a simulation is that controversial. We use computer models to study the human population, to predict the weather. For entertainment, we simulate everything. When a civilization can create a realistic simulation, the most obvious one to create is that of its own early existence.

Bostrom calls this an ancestral simulation. A simulation that can do this wouldn't just create one simulation. They would create many. And those simulated civilizations might create their own simulations of the universe and on and on like Russian nesting dolls of reality. Each of these simulations is tailored by their creators for some purpose. Maybe we're all part of a universe-wide Truman Show where people outside the simulation view our lives for entertainment.

Maybe a future civilization is trying to understand behavior in their time by studying parallels at ours.

Video game plots today cover many universal themes. So how is this much different than what we do with medieval fantasy games? If the simulation is real and we become aware of it, does that taint the data being gathered? So if one person does prove we are in a simulation, does that mean lights out for all of us? If we are all just modifiable code, would we even know if that happened? These seem like pretty important questions to ask.

So aside from Bostrom, who else has weighed in on this idea? When Elon Musk was asked what he thought the chances were that our reality is the original base reality, he said one in billions. To make this prediction, Elon assumes that our universe is 14 billion years old and that other civilizations have existed before us within that 14 billion year time frame.

He uses this time span as a maximum estimate for the time any advanced civilization would have to develop simulation technology. In the 1970s, the apex of computer graphics was Pong, just blocks on a screen. That was just 50 years ago. Imagine if that progress continued for hundreds of years, thousands, millions, billions...

That means if there are any civilizations much older than ours, they are far more computationally advanced. In fact, they may have already developed advanced simulation technology and we might be in it. Musk does think there is a very small chance we are in base reality, but that small chance, that one in billions, is based on the length of our cosmic timescale of billions of years.

But isn't that length of time potentially based on information inside a simulation? What if the program can make our universal laws and observations seem like it's been 14 billion years since the Big Bang, but it's either been much longer or much shorter?

Although Musk might still be right about us being in a simulation, the logic for his probability estimate may be completely wrong. What if the simulation is prognosticating what life would be like if it developed in our solar system? Perhaps the simulation has been advanced through time to reflect our regional development in the cosmos.

We could all be part of a simulation to see if life can exist and thrive in our area of the universe. Lots of possibilities exist, but so far we've only heard from philosophers and one tech entrepreneur. What about others? When it comes to simulation theory, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is a little more conservative compared to Elon Musk. He thinks the odds that we're in base reality versus a simulated reality is 50-50.

Now, a 50/50 chance that everything we experience is artificial, that's still pretty high. Tyson likely came to this 50/50 conclusion based on the principle of indifference in statistics. This essentially states that if we know nothing about the likelihood of the outcomes of some activity, like a coin toss, for example, we assign each an equal probability.

So since we're not able to know the difference between a simulation and base reality, according to Bostrom, we assign each possibility an equal chance within the framework of the theory. We're either in a simulation or we're not. It's 50-50.

The 50-50 estimate from DeGrasse Tyson also collapses Bostrom's trilemma into a dilemma, since the first two options both represent the same outcome of us not being in a simulation. Bostrom somewhat disagrees with this calculation and infers a 20% probability based on his original trilemma assumption and a few other factors.

Regardless of whether the probability is 50% or 20%, that's still a pretty high chance that our reality isn't at all what we think it is. So should we be concerned? Well, even though scientists like DeGrasse Tyson weigh in on this theory, it's not a scientific theory. Simulation theory isn't math, it's philosophy. It isn't physics, it's metaphysics.

So what we need is hard evidence that we live in a simulation. And to find proof, we'll have to take a hard look at the fabric of reality. Mike Tirico here with some of the 2024 Team USA athletes. What's your message for the team of tomorrow? To young athletes, never forget why you started doing it in the first place. You have to pursue something that you're passionate about. Win, lose, or draw, I'm always going to be the one having a smile on my face. Finding joy in why you do it keeps you doing it.

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Let's start at the beginning. There was no space or time. The contents of the entire universe were concentrated to the size of a tennis ball and had a temperature of a quadrillion degrees. Then suddenly, the Big Bang. Everything explodes outward faster than the speed of light. Then about 14 billion years later, we've got galaxies and planets and ice cream and K-pop.

Okay, if before the Big Bang there was no space and no time, then what was there? And what about the beginning of the universe from the religious point of view? God created everything. Fine. Where was he before?

What caused the Big Bang to happen in the first place? Or what made God decide to beatbox the universe into existence, or wiggle his nose, or whatever he did to make everything happen? If you ask a physicist to explain what existed before the universe, they'll give you an answer about quantum foam, dark energy, or something just as bonkers as the Big Bang.

Ask a theologian what existed before God created the universe, and you'll get an answer equally as confusing related to infinite existences and the unknowable nature of the divine. But what does make sense is that the universe was just sitting there, dormant. Then someone, somewhere decided to boot up a program.

And in that program, our program, are all the laws of the universe. Electromagnetism and gravitational force are written into the program. The speed of light gets a value. There's code for Planck's constant relating mass and energy. Avogadro's number gets a value, along with a bunch of other rules that govern the behavior of everything that exists. All parts of our program. Even consciousness itself is part of our simulation.

Each person within our reality is just a subroutine running within a gigantic computer. We're all designed to have different traits and participate in our reality in different ways.

Everyone, including you and me, are just complex, non-playable characters or NPCs that run off predetermined code. Perhaps that code is flexible and allows for some truly random behavior, but overall it still behaves according to rules prescribed in the program. Our consciousness feels like we're independent because we're kept in a constant state of ignorance,

by the combination of the simulation space programming and ad hoc additions run by simulation agents that maintain the illusion of reality. These simulation agents are designed to act, especially when the simulation is in jeopardy of being discovered. The ad hoc programs can do things like change the cognition of scientists when they view electrons in motion or reset and reconfigure the memories of different programmed humans within it.

But perhaps the program isn't perfect. Maybe you've had memories of past lives in different cultures. That's just your code getting commingled with another fragment in the simulation's memory. Been abducted by aliens? Maybe the simulation was overwriting your memory after you discovered it. Alien abductions are often difficult to prove. What if that's the point and the intent of the simulation?

Despite the program's sophisticated deception, there are many who claim to have experiences confirming we definitely are in a simulation. They tell tales of objects out of place, time skips, and the laws of physics breaking down. Some even tell stories of their own death and the confusion of having been rebooted. There are billions of people in the world, so there should be ample opportunity for people to see the cracks in our simulation.

If you've ever investigated simulation theory for yourself, you've often come across very strange stories and videos. Some are pretty tame, involving glitched physics during sporting events or birds and planes hovering, seemingly stationary in the sky. Other stories are straight up bone chilling. These include people claiming to have witnessed and lived through their own deaths.

One sunny afternoon, a young man claims he was once napping and woke up to a phone call. On the phone was his next-door neighbor, who asked him to help move some heavy furniture. Being a good friend, the man obliged. While carrying a massive antique dresser up the front stairs of his friend's house, another person helping let their grip on the dresser slip, leading to a catastrophe.

Unable to handle the full weight of the dresser, the man fell underneath it to the pavement, striking his head on the sidewalk, dying instantly. But according to this man, this wasn't the end. The next thing he remembers, he woke, again from his nap, 20 minutes before the incident and remembered everything. Just like before, he got a phone call from his neighbor to help move the furniture. But when he agreed to help his friend, this time the man said, somewhat jokingly, Oh.

I'll help carry everything, but I'm not touching the antique dresser. To which his friend replied, how did you know he had an antique dresser? In another example, a gas station attendant encountered a mysterious woman during a graveyard shift at night. The woman appeared to be a normal soccer mom type, but was clearly distraught to the point the attendant thought she might be on drugs. When she entered the gas station, the woman asked, can you see me?

Confused by the question and noticing the woman's distress, the clerk asked her to sit down and breathe. She began to tell him the story of how she'd just woken up in her car after dying in a car accident. Speaking with tremendous difficulty, the woman said that she remembered her car being hit, then colliding with a telephone pole. She also remembered feeling both pain and confusion as she died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

As she passed away, she slipped into a white light and then with a jolt, woke up in her car without a scratch on her. To her shock, her car was stopped at the same red light where she was just struck and killed. She immediately drove her car in the opposite direction, away from her own death and into the nearest parking lot, which happened to be the gas station.

She said she tried to calm herself before approaching the storefront, but that clearly didn't work out too well. Shocked but still in disbelief at the story, the attendant helped call the woman's husband to arrange a ride. After the woman and her husband left, the gas station attendant never heard from them again. Stories like these are common on simulation theory forums. People seem to think something is happening to them, but what's really going on here? Is the simulation protecting them?

Maybe. Maybe some people are flagged as critical and need to exist for the program to execute. Or maybe someone is telling a story on the internet for attention. Now, if you've never heard of simulation theory, then these stories might sound far-fetched. But some of the world's most respected scientists, technologists, and philosophers believe it is more likely than not that we are living in an artificial reality. So, how do we prove it?

If we do live in an artificial reality, it makes sense for there to be occasional glitches. Philip K. Dick is one of the most influential science fiction writers of all time. Movies based on his books include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, and plenty of others.

He believed there are many universes and sometimes those other realities bleed into ours. He claimed to have visions of this and even wrote stories like The Man in the High Castle based on these visions. He became obsessed with these visions late in his career. He died in 1982 after years of drug abuse and struggles with mental illness.

Perhaps whatever glitch that allowed him to see across simulated realities also corrupted his base program. It could be the madness that often overtakes brilliant minds that can be explained by something as mundane as a software error. One other way realities blend into ours could be the Mandela Effect.

The Mandela Effect is when a large number of people have memories of events that don't match reality. It's called the Mandela Effect because millions of people specifically remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison. He didn't. People remember his wife walking beside his casket in a funeral procession that was on television for two hours that day. This never happened. Or the Berenstain Bears, which people insist were always called the Berenstein Bears.

People remember the tycoon from Nopoli having a monocle that he never had. Darth Vader never said, Luke, I am your father. What he did say is... He told me you killed him. No, I am the father. Oh, no.

What about Stouffer's Stovetop Stuffing? One of my favorites on Turkey Day. Try searching for that in your local store and you'll be looking for a while. Stouffer doesn't make Stovetop Stuffing. That's craft. How about a classic Disney movie all of us watched growing up? Snow White. The evil queen looks into her mirror and you remember what she says? Mirror, mirror on the wall. Right? Nope. What wouldst thou know, my girl? Magic mirror on the wall.

- Who is the famous? - People remember Febreze being spelled with two Es. People remember Jiffy Peanut Butter, but there's no such thing. And there are a lot more of these, a lot more. Many of us know the kids show "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood." In 2019, a film about Mr. Rogers and the show was released. It's called "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." But even movie writers can't escape Mandela effects because the people who named the film got it wrong.

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood. A beautiful day for a neighbor. Speaking of movie titles, what about a classic movie from 1943, Casablanca? Many remember both Rick and Ilsa asking the piano player to play it again, Sam, when requesting the song as time goes by. Those people are also confused to find out that line is never in the movie. Actually, both main characters only ever say the words, play it, Sam.

Woody Allen made the same mistake in 1972 after creating both a play and a movie titled Play It Again Sam. Is this what caused the misconception for the rest of us? Or was Woody Allen himself the victim of a glitch in the simulation? What we can say from this is that when it comes to popular media, many people share the same completely wrong memories.

Maybe some people don't get all the new information when the simulation is updated or their code has been ported over from some other simulation. Personally, I don't have most of these false memories, but there are a few that get me. The Flintstones. There are two Ts in the Flintstones. I remember just one. What about the Fruit of the Loom logo? I swear it had a cornucopia, you know, a basket. But if you look, no, there's no cornucopia. It's just a pile of fruit.

And at the end of Moonraker, a terrible but excellent James Bond movie, I remember Jaws' girlfriend as having braces. I mean, I specifically remember it. She didn't have braces. She had pretty white teeth. I just can't get my brain to accept it. That's the Mandela Effect. So why do millions of people distinctly remember different things? Glitch in the simulation?

Philip K. Dick also felt that when we experience deja vu, it's because something in our simulated universe changed and a new timeline branched off of the current one. Ever feel like you've lived a moment before? That's because according to Philip K. Dick and others, you have. Deja vu is the simulation correcting itself with new information. But skeptics can easily dismiss these theories. The human mind is terribly unreliable. They don't accept any of this as evidence.

But we're not done yet.

We live in a huge universe, 200 billion trillion stars. Even if life is rare, you'd think there'd be some evidence somewhere. This is Fermi's paradox. According to the Drake equation, there should be over a million technologically advanced civilizations just in our galaxy. And on average, the nearest one should be just a few hundred light years away. But there's nothing, at least nothing we can see. So where is everybody?

Isn't it convenient that, so far, we're the only ones here? Are we really alone in the universe? Or does our program only focus on us? And what about the physical rules that are in place? Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT, said the strict laws of physics point to the possibility of a simulation.

Putting a cap on the speed of light is a good way to keep your sims from venturing out too far from home. Theoretical physicist James Gates doesn't quite buy into simulation theory, but while studying electrons, he found error-correcting code buried deep inside the equations used to describe particles in string theory. So you're saying as you dig deeper, you find computer code ripped in the fabric of the cosmos?

into the equations that we want to use to describe the cosmos? Yes.

Computer code. Computer code. Strings of bits of ones and zeros. It's not just sort of resembles computer code, you're saying it is computer code. It's not even just is computer code, it's a special kind of computer code that was invented by a scientist named Claude Shannon in the 1940s. That's what we find very, very deeply inside the equations that occur in string theory and in general in systems that we can say are supersymmetric.

To clarify, this doesn't mean that he looked really close at an electron and saw the matrix.

Dr. Gates studies supersymmetry, or putting it simply, the organization of different quantum particles and their relation to each other. Supersymmetry is just one part of a larger theory that tries to explain why our universe is what it is, whether that's a simulation or maybe something even weirder. Now, there's a lot of complicated math associated with Gates' work, but the conclusion is that he found features that are not so important.

that act like Shannon codes or prefixes used in data compression when he was studying supersymmetry. These features are still unexplained, but point to the possibility that something intelligent is at work. So what else do we have? In 2017, a group of scientists at the University of Washington proved they could embed computer code into strands of DNA.

DNA controls things like your hair color, your height, and whether you'll get a certain disease or not. If we can write computer code onto DNA, doesn't that mean something about us and our relationship with reality? What it does prove is that in our universe, numbers are very important, whether we're in a simulation or not. After all, everything in nature is math. Look at the Fibonacci sequence. You get the Fibonacci sequence by adding two previous numbers in the sequence together, so...

1 plus 1 equals 2, 2 plus 1 equals 3, 3 plus 2 equals 5, 5 plus 3 equals 8, and so on and so on. You get the golden ratio, also called phi, by dividing two consecutive Fibonacci numbers. So the number 89 is a Fibonacci number. The next number in the sequence after 89 is 144. 144 divided by 89 is the golden ratio. It's about 1.618.

And we see Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio everywhere. The number of petals on a flower is usually a Fibonacci number. Lilies have three petals. Buttercups have five. Chicory has 21 petals. A daisy has 34. And the spacing of each petal is arranged in a circle according to the golden ratio.

As trees grow, the number of branches they form is a Fibonacci number. Not just plants, but animals too. The ratio of female to male honeybees in a colony is the golden ratio, 1.618.

The human body conforms to the golden ratio too. Most of the body follows the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5. One nose, two eyes, three limb segments, five fingers and toes. The proportions of the body like the length of your shoulder to your elbow and from your elbow to your fingertips, that's the golden ratio. Even a DNA molecule measures 34 angstroms long by 21 angstroms wide. Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio.

From the spiral of seashells to the spiral of a galaxy and everything in between, Fibonacci numbers are everywhere. Some claim this is all a coincidence, that humans look for patterns in chaos because that's what we're programmed to do. Programmed to do.

Now, isn't that interesting? By trying to debunk simulation theory, they actually end up proving it. No matter what we study, whether it's something the size of a galaxy or as small as an electron, everything in the universe seems to follow patterns and rules. In other words, a program.

To simulate an entire universe, you'd obviously need more advanced technology than we have. But that doesn't mean we won't get there. Moore's Law says that computing power doubles every 18 months. And this has held true for 50 years. Now, that is slowing down a little bit, but only because of physical limitations. Now, one way around these limitations is through one of the most recent advances in technology, quantum computing.

Quantum computers are fundamentally different from normal or classical computers. They rely on the strange phenomena of quantum physics to perform computations. Normal computers use bits that can be in a one or a zero state to store information. Quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits. Qubits can exist in a superposition of zero and one. So a qubit can essentially be both zero and one at the same time.

This allows quantum computers to represent and process a massive amount of information at once. Another quantum property called entanglement causes groups of qubits to behave as a single system. This allows operations to be performed on many qubits simultaneously. So is quantum computing going to give us enough power to do a universal simulation? Well,

Well, maybe, but right now it's hard to imagine. Most quantum computers are only useful for specific types of calculations, not creating universal simulations. So what other options do we have? Well, assuming we can learn to make microchips smaller, and there's no doubt we will, it's predicted that artificial intelligence could surpass human intelligence within the next hundred years, or maybe sooner.

Let's assume for a second we build an AI and use it responsibly. Now, even though there's a lot of evidence that we probably won't, let's just assume we will. The emergence of a super intelligent AI system may accelerate technological development in ways that people have never imagined. Pattern recognition is something that helps drive progress in both science and engineering.

For example, an engineer may notice that certain defects occur at a specific time on a production line, helping identify a faulty machine or something else in need of improvement. Newton noticed apples falling and put together his gravitational theory. And when Einstein was 16, he imagined himself chasing after a beam of light, which later influenced his theories on special relativity.

Newton and Einstein were brilliant humans, but combine their brains with Leonardo da Vinci, Archimedes, Rene Descartes and Stephen Hawking, that could never match the reasoning power of an advanced AI, not even close. Using AI as a tool, we may discover that the laws of nature originally interpreted by genius level humans were wrong all along.

The breakthroughs that happen after these discoveries could open the door to new power generation methods, computational theories, and eventually universal simulation technology. If we are in a simulation, though, perhaps any AI we develop will also be constrained by its rules or worse, become a powerful new agent of the simulation, preventing any of us from ever knowing the truth.

If we aren't destroyed by AI or other things first, what types of technology do we know must be developed to support a simulation? Well, as Elon Musk points out when he was a kid, the world's most advanced video game was Pong, two rectangles on a screen. 40 years later, video game technology is barely distinguishable from reality.

He said that seven years ago, even in that short time, video game engines have become even more realistic. As I record this, Unreal Engine 5 is the most advanced game engine. In a recent study, people were shown two photographs. One was computer generated, one was actually a photograph. In 90% of the cases, people couldn't tell the difference. Imagine what games are going to look like in the next seven years, or the next 70, or 7,000.

What? Simulating an entire universe? How big of a computer would we need? It's estimated that there are 10 to the power of 80 atoms in the universe. That's already a number so large most can't even envision it. If each particle needs 128 bits to calculate its position and momentum, you're at 10 to the power of 83 bits. That's just for data storage.

We also need computing power to track what each of those particles is doing. So if we say two floating point operations per second or two flops per particle, we're at two times 10 to the 80th flops. There aren't even words for these numbers.

This is the computing power just for the stuff in the universe. What about human intelligence? The human brain can perform 100 trillion calculations per second or 100 teraflops. Multiplied by billions of people, the numbers are ridiculous.

To power all of this, the simulation would need access to multiple Dyson spheres, the megastructures that capture 100% of the energy of a star. Or it'd need to harness the energy from black holes. Now, building a Dyson sphere in our solar system would be astronomically difficult. Let's imagine one halfway between the sun and Mercury to harvest solar energy.

Now, assuming a shell thickness equal to a skyscraper, about 2,000 feet, the required material is mind-boggling, over 400 times Avogadro's number. Now, remember high school chemistry? A mole is 6.022 times 10 to the 23rd particles. If we produced a mole of rice grains, it would blanket the Earth 250 feet deep. Our sphere needs 400 moles of material.

Are you not following these numbers? Don't worry, you're not supposed to. All right, to get 400 moles of material, we'd need to convert planets into desired elements requiring a nuclear forge as powerful as a Dyson sphere. So which came first, the sphere or the forge to build it?

So making the shell a few atoms thin would reduce the material demand, but that's nanofabrication far beyond our ability. Plus, we don't know how to protect ourselves from solar flares. How are we supposed to protect a Dyson sphere a few atoms thick? So building a Dyson sphere requires technology far beyond today's capabilities. It demands breakthroughs in nuclear engineering and nanofabrication we won't achieve for a very long time, if ever.

The sheer scale makes constructing a solar system-sized energy harvester a distant dream given physics as we understand it.

This is why famous physicists like Dr. Michio Kaku are not on board with simulation theory. He claims that simulating entire galaxies is not scientifically possible. The only computer capable of simulating a universe is the universe itself. And at first glance, that makes sense. But with all due respect to Dr. Kaku, that's not how simulations work.

When you're playing a 3D video game, the entire game world is not rendered. Instead, the game engine only calculates what the player can see and interact with at that specific moment. Now, if we are living in a simulation, then it would make sense that the creators would use a similar technique. And wouldn't it be interesting if there was evidence that this is exactly what happens?

Supporters of simulation theory often point to video games as a way to explain, if not prove, that our reality is artificial. In a video game, the only data that is rendered is what the player sees or interacts with. If you're playing a video game and there's a car or a building a mile away, that entire object isn't rendered. The game engine only renders the bare minimum of information to make the object look real. A distant building is rendered as just a few pixels, not that complicated.

But as you get closer, the engine renders more details, but still it's just the facade. The engine doesn't bother calculating what's inside the building until you actually go in. The game engine always knows how much data to feed you and doesn't bother with anything else. Now, if we live in a simulation, it would make sense that our reality is rendered the same way.

And we can see this behavior through experiments. Specifically, we can use the double slit experiment. Here's how it goes. Imagine that you're rapidly firing ping pong balls at random locations on a wall. And you're recording ping pong ball hits. And they're all over the place. Fine.

Now put a screen in between you and the wall. In that screen is a narrow slit. Now shoot the ping pong balls again. Most bounce off the screen that you put in the way. The only ones that hit the wall are those that happen to pass through the slit.

On the wall, you'd expect to see a pattern that roughly matches the size of the slit in that screen. Now we add another slit to the screen. We expected we'd see two narrow vertical patterns on the wall since we are allowing these regions to be struck by the ping pong balls through the openings. Now if we try a similar experiment, but instead of ping pong balls, we try passing waves through the two slits,

Well, things start to get weird. If you drop a pebble into the water, it creates ripples or waves that spread out. Now imagine dropping two pebbles side by side. The ripples created by each pebble will eventually overlap. Where they overlap, they create a new pattern. This is called interference. Some parts of the waves combine to make bigger waves. Some parts cancel each other out, making flat spots.

Now, back to our two slits. If you shoot ping pong balls through the two slits on the wall, you see two lines. Makes sense. If you pass waves through the two slits, they act just like the water waves did. The waves create an interference pattern of many lines. It basically looks like a bunch of vertical lines, some light, some dark. So what happens with small particles like electrons?

We fire electrons through a single slit, we see the clumping pattern as expected. An electron has mass, so it's a tiny bit of matter. So if we fire electrons through two slits, we should see two clumps, just like the ping pong balls. But we don't. We see the wave interference pattern. What is going on here?

For years, scientists assumed that the electrons were colliding with each other, causing the wave pattern. In the 1960s, the experiment was modified so that only one electron at a time was fired through the slits. There was no way the electrons could interact with each other. Yet we still see an interference pattern of multiple lines. Scientists wanted to see what was causing this, so they added a detector to observe electrons as they pass through the slits.

That's when things go from weird to paranormal. As soon as the detectors were installed, the interference pattern went away and the clumping pattern returned. Take the detectors away and the wave interference pattern is back. It's as if the particles are aware they're being observed. Then physicist John Wheeler had an idea. He called it the delayed choice experiment. Here's how it works. Photons are projected through the double slit.

But the detector is not activated until after they pass through the slit, but before they impact the screen. Makes sense? We try to catch them in between. Photons were emitted as waves, passed through the slits as waves, but when the waves were observed before hitting the screen, suddenly they behaved like particles again. Still don't think there's intelligence at work?

Well, what Wheeler's experiment showed is that even though the electrons started as waves, they behaved like particles after being observed. At the moment the decision to observe them was made, the electrons recorded themselves as having passed through the slits as particles. In other words, the electrons changed their state by going back in time. Now, this experiment is happening on a table in a lab a very short distance.

So what happens when we observe light coming from vast distances, like say a galaxy 100 million light years away? If light from a distant galaxy is projected through the double slit, it creates the wave interference pattern. But if we push those photons through a measuring apparatus to observe them, guess what? The wave again collapses all the way back to its source. This is called retrocausality.

Simply by choosing to observe the photons this way, they reach back through time a hundred million years and alter their state on the other side of the galaxy. But, like a video game engine, it only does this if we're looking.

Now, even though our universe is full of galaxies, those galaxies may not actually be there. If we're living in a simulation, then stars and galaxies could simply be projections. And only when we get up close would those projections become more detailed. This is an excellent way to save computational resources. And because we're stuck with the hard limit of the speed of light, getting to far off places is really difficult.

To some, the quantum mechanics we just went over only makes sense if there's a program at work. The program can ignore the laws of physics and the concept of time itself. If that's the case, maybe there really is no possible way for us to know for sure if we're in a simulation. Now, someday one of us might find a glitch and have proof of the simulation. But before we know it, the simulation agent can hit rewind. And whatever you think you saw, well, it never happened.

Simulation theory allows for some easy explanations to a lot of things. The Big Bang, that was the simulation booting up. We haven't found aliens? Well, they're not in the simulation. How come UFOs seem to violate the laws of physics? Well, because they're programs operated by the simulation creators who don't have to follow the laws of physics. So who could be the creators of our simulation?

Well, that's where things get a little complicated. When you think of the simulation creator as an omniscient intelligence who exists outside of our understanding of space and time, it sounds an awful lot like you're describing God. And just like you can't prove we're not in a simulation, you can't prove there is no God. If something miraculous happens or something horrible happens, you can say it's part of the simulation just as easily as you can say it's part of God's plan.

Something I find very interesting is that many believers of simulation theory are fierce atheists. They dismiss the idea of God as corny superstition. And there are plenty of devoutly religious people who dismiss provable science like evolution and the age of the earth.

People on the religious side say that if there is no God and life is just a simulation, then nothing matters. Without God to guide us and sometimes punish us, depending on what you believe, our actions don't have consequences. I disagree.

Even if we don't live in base reality, we still live in our reality. And our actions here do have consequences. As for what happens after we die, simulation or not, nobody really knows. Both sides argue that faith and science are not compatible. But isn't this hypocritical? Whether you believe in God or you believe in simulation theory, the real question is, what's the difference?

Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learn anything, do me a favor, leave the podcast a nice review. That lets me know to keep making these things for you. And like most topics I cover on the Y-Files, today's was recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to learn more about, go to the Y-Files.com slash tips. And special thanks to our patrons who make the Y-Files possible. I dedicate every episode to you and I couldn't do this without your support.

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