If our Matrix overlords are similarly focused on efficiency, they may be meticulous about simulating details while we’re watching an event, but allow a looser style of simulation when they think nobody is looking. In a recently proposed test, former NASA engineer Thomas Campbell and his colleagues point out that human video game designers typically maximize the efficiency of their programming by generating only the parts of the virtual world that players can see. Is our world badly rendered?Īnother way to sleuth for glitches in the simulation is by looking inward rather than outward. “There always remains the possibility for the simulated to discover the simulators,” the authors write. But Beane and company are encouraged that making such a measurement is feasible, at least in principle. It would be a delicate task: High-energy cosmic rays are rare, and the deviations from ordinary physical effects might not be obvious. That seems like a great place to start hunting for bugs in any simulation. The detectors have already discovered particles as much as 100 quintillion times as energetic as visible light. Instruments like the Telescope Array, a network of 500 detectors scattered across 300 square miles of Utah desert, watch for cosmic rays as they crash into Earth’s atmosphere from deep space.
In a paper he wrote with two colleagues, Beane proposes that a simulation lattice could affect the behavior of ultra-energetic particles known as cosmic rays, affecting their orientation and maximum intensity. If our reality is built on top of a lattice, there’d be a fundamental coarseness to it, since there could be no details in our mock-universe smaller than the resolution of the simulation.Įven if the resolution limit is too small for us to observe directly, Beane says, we may be able to detect it experimentally. Maybe the aliens (or whoever built our simulation, if it exists) used that approach, too. He points out that scientists in his field use a lattice-like set of coordinates to simulate the behavior of subatomic particles.
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