Are we living inside an advanced simulation?
It’s a question that continues to fascinate scientists, philosophers, and tech leaders like Elon Musk. Some believe the universe itself may be like a huge computer, running on information rather than just matter and energy.
A new study adds even more fuel to this idea.
Dr. Melvin Vopson, a physicist from the University of Portsmouth, has published new research suggesting that gravity—the force that pulls objects together—might actually be the result of the universe trying to organize information.
His paper, which was recently highlighted by the journal AIP Advances, proposes a bold idea: that physical reality is made up of information, and that gravity is a kind of housekeeping process within a giant computational system.
Dr. Vopson bases his theory on something called information dynamics, which is similar to the laws of thermodynamics but focuses on how information behaves.
He explains that matter might naturally come together in space because the universe is trying to keep things simple and organized. Just like computers work better when their data is compressed and easy to manage, the universe might be doing the same.
In earlier research, Dr. Vopson suggested that information has mass, and that the tiniest building blocks of the universe—particles—store information about themselves, much like DNA stores information in living cells.
In his latest work, he describes space as being made up of tiny “cells” that can hold data. If a cell is empty, it records a “0”; if it contains matter, it records a “1.” This system, he says, is very similar to how digital computers or video games work.
When particles are scattered across space, the system needs more “computational power” to keep track of them. But if the particles are combined into fewer, bigger objects, it’s much easier to manage.
According to Dr. Vopson, this drive to save computational resources is what creates the force we experience as gravity: the universe pulling things together to simplify its information storage.
This new way of thinking about gravity could change how we understand not just our universe, but mysteries like black holes, dark matter, and even quantum mechanics.
While it’s still an open question whether we truly live in a computer-like universe, Dr. Vopson’s work offers a fascinating new perspective on one of the oldest forces in nature.
