Particle.news
Download on the App Store

Physicists Say the Universe Cannot Be a Simulation

Drawing on Gödel’s incompleteness within quantum-gravity models, the paper argues that only non-algorithmic understanding could fully describe reality.

Overview

  • The study, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, asserts that computation alone cannot yield a complete, consistent account of nature.
  • Authors Mir Faizal, Lawrence M. Krauss, Arshid Shabir, and Francesco Marino build on frameworks where space and time emerge from an information-based foundation.
  • Invoking Gödel’s incompleteness, they argue there are true statements no algorithm can capture, so any purely algorithmic simulation of reality is impossible.
  • The authors also conclude a computational theory of everything cannot exist, proposing a deeper, non-algorithmic layer to underpin physical law.
  • Some researchers, including Melvin Vopson and Javier Moreno, dispute the reasoning as a category error that imposes a simulated world’s rules on any hypothetical host system.