[Music] is this reality well we're experiencing something right now so maybe the better question is what is reality could everything we see everything we experience everything that exists in our entire universe be artificial supporters of simulation theory believe that not only is it possible that we're living in a simulation it's likely and the more we look for evidence the more we find let's find out why the idea of the universe being a simulation is not a new one theories exist in ancient cultures around the world modern simulation theory comes from nick bostrom a philosopher at oxford who wrote an influential paper on the subject in 2003 assuming that living in a simulation is possible bostrom presents the simulation trilemma which says one of the following must be true one we destroy ourselves before we're able to create a simulation two we're able to create a simulation but choose not to or three we are definitely in a simulation boston believes each of these is equally likely to be true now i don't think that's controversial we use computer models to study the human population predict the weather for entertainment we simulate everything and when a civilization can create a realistic simulation the most obvious one to create is that of its own early existence bostrom calls this an ancestral simulation and a civilization that can do this wouldn't just create one simulation it would create many and those simulated civilizations might create their own simulations of the universe and on and on like russian nesting dolls of reality now you're a character in that world and you think you have free will and say i want to invent a computer so you do hey i want to create a world in my computer and then that world creates a world in its computer and then you have simulations all the way down when elon musk was asked what he thought the chances were that our reality is the original base reality the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions neil degrasse tyson is a little more conservative he thinks the odds that we are in base reality versus a simulated reality is 50 50. a 50 50 chance that everything we experience is artificial that's still pretty high and even though we mostly hear what scientists think about this it's not scientific theory simulation theory isn't math it's philosophy it isn't physics it's metaphysics so what we need is hard evidence that we live in a simulation and to find proof all you have to do is look [Music] let's start at the beginning there was no space or time the contents of the entire universe were concentrated to the size of a tennis ball and had a temperature of a quadrillion degrees then suddenly the big bang everything explodes outward faster than the speed of light then about 14 billion years later we've got galaxies and planets and ice cream and k-pop [Music] yeah i could do without the k-pop me too okay if before the big bang there was no space and no time what was there what about the beginning of the universe from the religious point of view god created everything fine where was he before what caused the big bang to happen in the first place what made god decide to snap his fingers or wiggle his nose or whatever he did to make everything happen if you ask a physicist to explain what existed before the universe they'll give you an answer about quantum foam dark energy or something just as bonkers as the big bang ask a theologian what existed before god created the universe and you'll get an answer equally as confusing but what does make sense is that the universe was just sitting there dormant then someone somewhere decided to boot up a program and in that program our program or all the laws of the universe electromagnetism and gravitational force are written into the program the speed of light gets a value there's code for planck's constants of mass speed and time avogadro's number is in there along with a bunch of other rules that govern the behavior of everything that exists all part of our program even consciousness itself is part of our simulation if you've never heard of simulation theory then this might sound far-fetched but some of the world's most respected scientists technologists and philosophers believe that it is more likely than not that we are living in an artificial reality so how do we prove it [Music] if we live in an artificial reality it would make sense for there to be occasional glitches philip k dick is one of the most influential science fiction writers of all time movies based on his books include blade runner total recall minority report the adjustment bureau and plenty of others he believed there are many universes and sometimes those other realities bleed into ours he claimed to have visions of this and even wrote stories like the man in the high castle based on these visions that in fact plural realities did exist superimposed onto one another by so many film transparencies one way other realities blend into ours could be the mandela effect the mandela effect is when a large number of people have memories of events that don't match reality this is called the mandela effect because millions of people specifically remember nelson mandela died in prison he didn't people remember his wife walking beside his casket in a funeral procession that was on television for two hours that day this never happened or the berenstain bears which people insist were always called the berenstein bears people remember the tycoon from monopoly having a monocle that he never had what was darth vader famous for saying luke i am your father nope he never said that what what about stouffer's stovetop stuffing best part of thanksgiving no it isn't because there's no such product stovetop is made by craft ah no the evil queen from snow white who looked into her mirror and said mirror mirror on the wall nope magic mirror on the wall who is the fairest one of all my reality is shattered people remember febreze being spelled with two e's people remember jiffy peanut butter but there's no such thing and there are a lot more a lot more personally i don't have most of these false memories but there are a few that get me the flintstones there are two t's in the flintstones i remember just one and what about the fruit of the loom logo i could swear it looks like this but it doesn't this is the actual logo no cornucopia coin you what now basket didn't you say basket for crying out loud and at the end of moonraker a terrible but excellent james bond movie i remember jaw's girlfriend as having braces i mean i specifically remember it she didn't have braces i just can't get my brain to accept it that's the mandela effect so why do millions of people distinctly remember different things glitch in the simulation yep philip k dick also felt when we experienced deja vu is because something in our simulated universe changed and a new timeline branched off of the current one we are living in a computer-programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed ever feel like you've lived a moment before that's because according to philip k dick and others you have deja vu is the simulation correcting itself with new information but skeptics can easily dismiss these theories the human mind is terribly unreliable they don't accept this as evidence but we're not done yet [Music] we live in a huge universe 200 billion trillion stars and even if life is rare you'd think there'd be some evidence of it somewhere this is fermi's paradox but according to the drake equation there should be over a million technologically advanced civilizations just in our galaxy and on average the nearest one should be just a few hundred light years away but there's nothing at least not that we can see so where is everybody are we really alone in the universe or does our program only focus on us and what about the physical rules that are in place max tegmark a cosmologist at mit said the strict laws of physics point to the possibility of a simulation putting a cap on the speed of light sure is a good way to keep your sims from venturing out too far from home theoretical physicist james gates thought simulation theory was crazy then he started studying quarks and electrons he found error correcting code buried deep inside the equations used to describe string theory so you're saying as you dig deeper you find computer code writ in the fabric of the cosmos into the equations that we want to use to describe the cosmos yes computer code computer code strings of bits of ones and zeros dr gates has changed his mind about simulation theory in 2017 a group of scientists at the university of washington proved they can embed computer code into strands of dna everything in nature is math look at the fibonacci sequence you get the fibonacci sequence by adding two previous numbers in the sequence together so one plus one equals two two plus one equals three three plus two equals five five plus three equals eight and so on forever you get the golden ratio also called fee by dividing two consecutive fibonacci numbers so the number 89 is a fibonacci number the next number in the sequence after 89 is 144. 144 divided by 89 is the golden ratio it's about 1.618 we see fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio everywhere the number of petals on a flower is usually a fibonacci number lilies have three petals buttercups have five chicory has 21 and a daisy has 34 and the spacing of each petal is arranged in a circle according to the golden ratio as trees grow the number of branches they form is a fibonacci number and not just plants animals too the ratio of female to male honeybees in a colony is the golden ratio 1.618 the human body conforms to the golden ratio too most of the body follows the numbers one two three and five one nose two eyes three limb segments five fingers five toes the proportions of the body like the length of your shoulder to your elbow and from your elbow to your fingertips that's the golden ratio even a dna molecule measures 34 angstroms long by 21 angstroms wide fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio from the spiral of seashells to the spiral of a galaxy and everything in between fibonacci numbers are everywhere now some claim this is a coincidence that humans look for patterns in chaos because that's what we're programmed to do what what program to do it isn't that interesting by trying to debunk simulation theory they actually end up proving it no matter what we study whether it's something the size of a galaxy or as small as an electron everything in the universe seems to follow patterns and rules in other words a program [Music] to simulate an entire universe you'd obviously need more advanced technology than we have but that doesn't mean we won't get there moore's law says that computing power doubles every 18 months and this is held true for about 50 years now that is slowing down a little bit but only because of physical limitations assuming we can learn to make microchips smaller and there's no doubt that we will it's predicted that artificial intelligence could surpass human intelligence within the next hundred years as elon musk points out when he was a kid the world's most advanced video game was pong two rectangles on a screen forty years later video game technology is barely distinguishable from reality he said that six years ago and even in that short time video game engines have become even more realistic look at this footage from unreal engine 5 when a world we can build feels as real as our own imagine what games are going to look like in the next six years or the next 60 or the next 6 000 but simulating an entire universe how big of a computer would we need well it's estimated that there are 10 to the power of 80 atoms in the universe let me put that on the screen just for fun okay but that's a lot if each particle needs 128 bits to calculate its position and momentum you're at 10 to the power of 83 bits and that's just for data storage we also need computing power to track what each of those particles is doing if we say two floating point operations per second or two flaps per particle we're at 2 times 10 to the 80th power flops there aren't even words for these numbers and this is the computing power for just the stuff in the universe what about human intelligence the human brain can perform 100 trillion calculations per second or 100 teraflops multiplied by billions of people the numbers are ridiculous to power all of this the simulation would need access to multiple dyson spheres the megastructures that capture 100 of the energy of a star or the simulation would have to harness the energy from black holes this is why famous physicists like dr michio kaku are not on board with simulation theory he claims that simulating a universe is not scientifically possible the only computer capable of simulating a universe is the universe itself now at first glance this makes sense but with all due respect to dr kaku that's not how simulations work when you're playing a 3d video game the entire game world isn't rendered instead the game engine only calculates what the player can see and interact with at that specific moment if we were living in a simulation then it would make sense that the creators of the simulation would use a similar technique and wouldn't it be interesting if there was evidence that this is exactly what happens well wait a minute do we have proof sweet fancy moses supporters of simulation theory often point to video games as a way to explain if not prove that our reality is artificial in a video game the only data that is rendered is what the player sees or interacts with if you're playing a video game and there's a car or building a mile away that entire object isn't rendered the game engine only renders the bare minimum of information to make the object look real a distant building is rendered as just a few pixels not that complicated as you get closer the engine renders more details but still it's just a facade the engine doesn't bother calculating what's inside the building to actually go in the game engine always knows how much data to send you and doesn't bother with anything else if we live in a simulation it would make sense that our reality is rendered the same way and we could test this wait what do you mean we can test this specifically we can use the double slit experiment here's how it goes if we fire particles in a straight line at a screen after passing through a single slit we would expect to see this clumping pattern on the screen if we try this with a wave we expect to see a pattern like this where particles are most dense in the middle of the screen but radiate outward similar to the clumping pattern when we add a second slit it starts to get fun when the waves pass through the double slit each slit creates its own wave when those waves intersect they cancel each other out that creates a pattern like this it's called an interference pattern so particles passing through two slits create clumping patterns waves through two slits creates an interference pattern make sense good if we fire electrons through the slit we see the clumping pattern as expected an electron has mass so it's a tiny bit of matter so if we fire electrons through two slits we should see two clumps but we don't we see the wave interference pattern this shouldn't be happening what's going on here for years scientists assume that the electrons were colliding with each other causing the wave pattern but in the 60s the experiment was modified so that only one electron at a time was fired through the slits there was no way the electrons could interact with each other yet we still see an interference pattern scientists wanted to see what was causing this so they added a detector to observe electrons as they pass through the slits that's when things go from weird to paranormal as soon as the detectors were installed the interference pattern went away and the clumping pattern returned take the detectors away and the wave interference pattern is back but that's a different result to what we had earlier so here's the last bit of sneakiness that we can play with atoms surely now you know we're we're going to get to grips with it leave the detector there but just very quietly go and unplug it don't let the atoms know that you're not spying on them run the experiment again now if you can explain this using common sense and logic do let me know because there's a nobel prize for you it's as if the particles are aware they're being observed then physicist john wheeler had an idea he called it the delayed choice experiment how it works is photons are projected through the double slit but the detector is not activated until after they pass through the slit but before they impact the screen photons were emitted as waves passed through the slits as waves but when the waves were observed before hitting the screen they suddenly behave like particles again still don't think there's an intelligence at work well what wheeler's experiment showed is that even though the electrons started as waves but behaved like particles after being observed at the moment the decision to observe them was made the electrons recorded themselves as having passed through the slits as particles the electrons change their state by going back in time [Music] i personally find that i gravitate more towards the information theoretic point of view and and believing that uh that i'm i the universe that i exist in is a very good high quality simulation now this experiment is happening on a table in a lab a very short distance so what happens when we observe light coming from vast distances like say a galaxy 100 million light years away if light from a distant galaxy is projected through the double slit it creates the wave interference pattern but if we push those photons through a measuring apparatus to observe them the wave again collapses all the way back to its source this is called retrocausality simply by choosing to observe the photons this way they reach back through time 100 million years and alter their state on the other side of the galaxy but like a video game engine it only does this if we're looking even though our universe is full of galaxies those galaxies may not actually be there if we're living in a simulation then stars and galaxies could simply be projections and only when we get up close with those projections become more detailed this is an excellent way to save computational resources and because we're stuck with a hard limit of the speed of light getting to far-off places is really difficult limiting the speed of light is a useful rule to have in place quantum mechanics like the double slit experiment and quantum entanglement only makes sense if there's a program at work because only the program can ignore the laws of physics and ignore the concept of time itself [Music] a convenient case for simulation theory is you can't disprove it the big bang that was the simulation booting up we haven't found aliens they're not in the simulation how come ufos seem to violate the laws of physics well because they're programs operated by the simulation creators they don't have to follow the laws of physics but who created the simulation well that's the big question isn't it when you think of the simulation creator as an omniscient intelligence who exists outside of our understanding of space and time it sounds an awful lot like you're describing god and just like you can't prove we're not in a simulation you can't prove there is no god if something miraculous happens or something horrible happens you can say it's part of the simulation just as easily as you can say it's part of god's plan something i find very interesting is that many believers of simulation theory are fierce atheists they dismiss the idea of god as corny superstition there are plenty of devoutly religious people who dismiss provable science like evolution and the age of the earth people on the religious side say that if there is no god and life is just a simulation then nothing matters without god to guide us and sometimes punish us depending on what you believe our actions don't have consequences i disagree even if we don't live in base reality we still live in our reality and our actions here do have consequences as for what happens after we die simulation or not nobody really knows both sides argue that faith and science are not compatible isn't this hypocritical whether you believe in god or you believe in simulation theory the real question is what's the difference [Music] thank you so much for hanging out with me today my name is aj that's hecklefish this has been the files if you had fun or learned anything do me a favor and like subscribe comment share all that stuff really helps a small channel trying to solve the youtube algorithm is like trying to find proofer in a simulation but with your help we'll get to the truth until next time be safe be kind and know that you are appreciated [Music] you