A new research paper reframes the simulation hypothesis, asking whether reality could be simulated and what science can test.

Researchers say it's impossible to use algorithmic computation to generate everything in our universe. The possibility that our entire universe merely exists inside a computer simulation is more than ...

A military planner at the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, watches a battle unfold without taking his eyes off the computer screen. The software is tracking a million vehicles spread over ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

If such a simulation were possible, the simulated universe could itself give rise to life, which in turn might create its own simulation. This recursive possibility makes it seem highly unlikely that ...

In this week's It’s Debatable article, Rick Rosen and Charles Moster debate whether we're all living in a computer simulation like the Matrix. Rosen retired as a professor from the Texas Tech ...

Unless you, dear reader, are a web-scraping software bot quietly pulling this text into a data-hungry LLM, you’re probably a human. And though you’ve likely never seen me in person, you have good ...

For years, the idea that reality might be a sophisticated computer program has drifted from late-night dorm debates into mainstream culture and serious philosophy. Now a new wave of theoretical work ...

Looking back at the history of computers, it’s hard to overestimate the rate at which computing power has scaled in the course of just a single human lifetime. But yet, existing classical computers ...

If you’re interested in VR, you’ve probably thought at least once or twice about the simulation hypothesis—the idea that we might actually already be living in a virtual reality world. Many people are ...

“A sun of our own and it’s made in Britain!” crowed the headline. The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) believed its 120-ton experimental reactor Zeta was almost certainly generating neutrons from ...

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow ...