Is Universe a Virtual Simulation? Really?

Nick Bostrom

Are we living inside a super-computer simulated environment? Is our universe nothing but the result of powerful codes? Is our reality virtual? Do we exist at all? Some of you may startle, others shocked and I am excited. The question of existence and its' possible meaning has always donned my mind, as it does everybody else's. After flirting through possibly all kinds of explanations including that of pantheism and Advaita, I made peace with the chaos. Probably there is no meaning after all. Or at best keep yourself open to everything, unconvinced. The saintly skeptic silence. The imaginative skills of our mind are boundless, the imaginations are out-of-the-world, inside an idiot-box? The possibility of our universe's existence as mere computer game or programmes, simulated by super-human intelligent beings had hit me long back. Doesn't it sound interesting, exciting and blasphemous to an extent? Finally scientists have started indulging such a hypothesis.

Martin Savage (left); Photo Courtesy: Seattle Times

Apparently it has been turned out I wasn't the first one to think 'the-simulated-way'. Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at Oxford presented the hypothesis in a 2003 paper. Now, a team of theoretical physicists in University of Washington, led by Prof. Martin Savage, have presented a paper on such a possible explanation of our existence, our reality, virtually. Please read the Seattle Times report, 'Living in a simulated world: UW scientists explore the theory, to understand more of this exciting new prospect. The question that lingers at the end of the trail is 'Who-stole-my-idea?'