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Weird Science & the New Social Imaginary

Weird Science & the New Social Imaginary

Last updated on: May 16, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Weird Science & the New Social Imaginary 2025-05-13T19:34:23-04:00 Gene Veith

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Futurism is a webzine devoted to covering developments in science and technology. It is owned by Recurrent Ventures, the same outfit that runs the venerable Popular Science, so it has some credibility.

Recently, Futurism has published articles by its senior editor Victor Tangermann about scientists who claim to have found evidence for the two wildest theories being proposed to explain the anomalies they keep running up against in nature: (1) that the universe is a computer simulation; and (2) that there are an infinite number of parallel universes.

In Physicist Says He’s Identified a Clue That We’re Living in a Computer Simulation, Victor Tangermann reports on the findings and links to the research:

In a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances, University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson offered a new interpretation of gravity, arguing that it could be the result of the universe trying to make itself less cluttered, thereby behaving much like a computer algorithm.

“This is another example of data compression and computational optimization in our universe, which supports the possibility of a simulated or computational universe,” he wrote.

It turns out, Tangermann says, “Vopson’s article is part of a greater movement of scientists trying to explain the forces of nature by arguing that they’re the result of an all-encompassing simulation.”

Vopson built on his own “second law of information dynamics” proposition, which holds that the “entropy of any system remains constant or increases over time,” to argue that gravity is pulling together matter and objects in space to keep entropy at a minimum, much like a computer tidying and compressing data.

“My findings in this study fit with the thought that the universe might work like a giant computer, or our reality is a simulated construct,” said Vopson in a statement. “Just like computers try to save space and run more efficiently, the universe might be doing the same.”

“It’s a new way to think about gravity,” he added, “not just as a pull, but as something that happens when the universe is trying to stay organised.”

He sees in the “information” stored in quantum states as “a kind of pixelation of ones and zeroes.” Thus, “The process is identical to how a digital computer game, virtual reality application, or other advanced simulation would be designed.”

On the larger scale, he argues,”it appears that the gravitational attraction is just another optimising mechanism in a computational process that has the role to compress information.”

UPDATE: Here is Vopson’s explanation.

Another Tangermann article in Futurism is Google Says It Appears to Have Accessed Parallel Universes:

The search giant recently unveiled a new quantum computer chip, dubbed Willow, which — on a specific benchmark, at least — the company says can outperform any supercomputer in the world.

“Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing,” Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in a blog post announcing the chip. “It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10²⁵ or 10 septillion years.”

“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe,” he argued. “It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”

Deutsch is a physicist who laid out his multiverse hypothesis in a 1997 book called “The Fabric of Reality,” in which he suggested that quantum computers’ calculations take place across multiple universes at the same time.

Now the multiverse hypothesis has a longer pedigree than the computer simulation theory and is taken more seriously by scientists. Read the Wikipedia article on Multiverse, which mentions among its advocates prominent scientists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking.

Wikipedia also gives away the main attraction of the theory: It gives scientists a way to evade the implications of the anthropic principle–the fact that the universe on every level is “fine-tuned” for life–which is powerful evidence for Intelligent Design and the reality of God:

The concept of other universes has been proposed to explain how our own universe appears to be fine-tuned for conscious life as we experience it.

If there were a large (possibly infinite) number of universes, each with possibly different physical laws (or different fundamental physical constants), then some of these universes (even if very few) would have the combination of laws and fundamental parameters that are suitable for the development of matter, astronomical structures, elemental diversity, stars, and planets that can exist long enough for life to emerge and evolve.

The weak anthropic principle could then be applied to conclude that we (as conscious beings) would only exist in one of those few universes that happened to be finely tuned, permitting the existence of life with developed consciousness. Thus, while the probability might be extremely small that any particular universe would have the requisite conditions for life (as we understand life), those conditions do not require intelligent design as an explanation for the conditions in the Universe that promote our existence in it.

So it appears that Science is resorting to irrational, non-verifiable, non-empirical theories to avoid “in the beginning, God created heaven and earth.”

Somehow, believing the entire universe is a computer simulation, that all reality is virtual reality, as in the Matrix movies, is more scientifically respectable than to believe that the universe was created and is constantly sustained by the Mind of God. Perhaps Prof. Vopson has some valid observations regarding the foundational function of “information” in the structure of the universe. But instead of leaping to the conclusion of a computer program, he might have seen the connection between “information” and “language”; that is to say, the “Word,” the Logos of John 1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-5)

He might have done something about light, whose speed is the universal constant, wondering why that is and seeing its connection to this primal Logos–the root word of “logic”–that orders all existence. If he observed something about gravity acting like some kind of Artificial Intelligence that holds the universe together, making adjustments as needed, he might consider an Actual Intelligence (why doesn’t he ask who might be the Programmer be who has coded this simulation?), namely, the Son of God who “is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

And why is it easier for scientists to believe in multiple universes, even an infinite number of universes, than to believe in an infinite God?

I know why scientists drifted away from religious explanations, unlike founders of science just as Newton and Kepler. The scientific method was to focus on empirical evidence and verifiable models. Then the notion arose, not from science itself but from philosophy about science, that the scientific method is the only way to access the only kind of truth. That reduced reality to the interactions of inert matter, excluding any kind of meaning except what can be constructed within and by the human mind.

Intellectual historians have written about how the rise of science “disenchanted” nature, leading to a “social imaginary” that could not even imagine religious assertions, leading to the rise of secularism and the eclipse of religion.

But now science is abandoning its own method and its own criteria! Swept along by the technological creations of engineers, some of them are trying to understand nature in terms of human creations. The Enlightenment scientists in the age of the industrial revolution conceived of nature as a vast machine. The post-Enlightenment scientists in the age of information technology are trying to think of it as a computer. But the computer-simulation hypothesis is non-empirical, non-verifiable, non-rational, and absurd on the face of it. And the infinite number of parallel universe hypothesis is even more so!

My point is this: a “social imaginary” that is open to the-universe-as-a-computer-simulation and infinite universes can no longer be closed to belief in God.

Illustration: The Infinite Crystal Universe 2 (teamLab Planets TOKYO) by wa_me via Flickr, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

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