The smell of coffee. Sunlight on an early summer morning. The sound of the wind in the forest. All of this can, according to a philosophical argument published in 2003, be as real as pixels on a screen. Namely, according to the simulation hypothesis, we may be living in an imaginary reality; everything we experience is actually a model of something else.
Although it was just a thought, or a philosophical experiment, experts tried to see if there really was something there and found that there was. The second law of infodynamics, coined by physicist Melvin Wopson of the University of Portsmouth and mathematician Serban Lepadatu of the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy in the UK, supports the idea that everything we experience is just a sophisticated model of some pretty powerful computer.
“The discovery of the second law of information dynamics (infodynamics) in 2022 provided new and interesting research tools at the intersection of physics and information,” writes Wopson, as reported by Science Alert.
“In this paper, we reexamine the second law of infodynamics and its application to digital information, genetic information, atomic physics, mathematical symmetries, and cosmology, and provide scientific evidence supporting the simulated universe hypothesis,” he adds.
What is the second law of infodynamics? Wopson and Lepadatu’s second law of infodynamics is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that any natural process in the universe will result in a loss of energy and an increase in the disorder, or entropy, of the system. Wopson (who proposed that information should be viewed as a form of matter) expected that the same would be true of information systems and that their type of disturbance should increase over time.
However, after studying two different information systems, digital data storage and the RNA genome, he discovered that this was not the case and that the second law of infodynamics actually required that the “entropy of information” remain the same or even decrease over time. the weather.