Gravity Is Evidence We’re Living in a Simulation, New Theory Suggests

What if gravity—the force that keeps us stuck to the planet—is actually just the universe trying to save processing power?

According to physicist Melvin Vopson, this isn’t just the random musing of a stoned Silicon Valley programmer; it’s the basis of a serious scientific theory. One that kind of, sort of presupposes that life as we know it is, indeed, a simulation.

Vopson’s study says the Universe might be a giant cosmic PC trying to run itself efficiently. And gravity is one of the tools it uses to make things run more smoothly.

Gravity, he suggests, is what happens when the Universe wants to keep things tidy. When stuff clumps together in space, it’s not just mass attracting mass; it’s a cheat code to reduce the processing load.

Does Gravity Support the Theory That We’re Living in a Simulation?

Science Alert’s Michelle Starr came up with a good analogy for it: think of it as a cosmic .zip file that optimizes space by compressing data, or objects, in this case, rather than leaving it scattered about.

This tracks with something Vopson’s been working on for years. In 2022, he and mathematician Serban Lepadatu cooked up the “second law of infodynamics,” a somehow dorkier version of thermodynamics’ entropy law. Instead of everything decaying into chaos, this version argues that the Universe is actively reducing information entropy.

He dives ever deeper into the sci-fi-iness of it all by proposing that information has mass, and that particles are like the 1s and 0s of a universal hard drive.

Remember how I said “one that kind of, sort of presupposes that life as we know it is, indeed, a simulation” earlier? Maybe you can tell that Vopson seems to be suggesting that this theory could apply to life as a simulation, but also to natural life if it isn’t a simulation, because it would essentially be functioning as if it were a computer system trying to optimize itself for maximum efficiency.

He’s trying to have it both ways. Since none of this is of any true consequence to our daily lives, I say we let them have this one. If either version turned out to be true, it wouldn’t change how gravity works, but it might change why it works, making it a scientific breakthrough regardless.