BoA Physics

Friend of the blog Michael Wester tells me that noted science foundation Bank of America has issued a report to its clients that there is a 20-50% chance we are living in a Matrix-style simulation.  (Where are my cool shades and shiny leather coat?)  The report cites Elon Musk, Neil de Grasse Tyson, philosopher Nick Bostrom, and others.

You may well wonder why the Bank of America takes such an interest in the question.  Perhaps they want to assure their clients that any money lost by BoA never really existed.

Still, you may remember my Implied Spaces, where I suggested that the existence of cosmological constants would point to the artificiality of the universe, because such a constant would just be an arbitrary number or formula inserted by the creators to make their experiment work the way they wanted it to.

Still, “artificial” is not the same thing as “simulation.”  To run a computer simulation of the entire universe would run up against the Bekenstein Bound, which limits the amount of information that can be contained in a universe with a finite amount of energy.  To describe a single hydrogen atom takes a megabyte of information, so to describe the actions and interactions of all particles in the universe would take . . . well, a heck of a lot of megabytes.  Any computer big enough to run a simulation of the universe would have to be larger than the universe itself, and with a lot more energy.

Personally I think we’re all living in the Hardwired universe, albeit a few years before the action of the book begins.