New Delhi: Is the whole universe just a simulation? Zeb Rocklin, a professor of physics at Georgia Tech university has tackled this question in The Converation, as part of a series aimed at Curious Kids. This is a subject that has captivated me since The Matrix, and is a great launchpad to explore some mind-blowing theories. This question forces us to consider the extent to which reality is a subjective experience, if some kind of divine mind or computer sustains the material world, the extent to which external forces can fabricate our experiences, as well as the difference between things as they truly are and how we perceive them.

The advent of quantum mechanics showed us that the observer played a critical role in shaping reality, where measurement collapses wave functions, suggesting reality emerges from information processing. This was the crucial revelation of the Copenhagen Interpretation, championed by Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Building on insights derived from black hole thermodynamics by Gerard ‘t Hooft, Leonard Susskind suggested in the 1990s that the information of the universe is encoded in a........

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