Are we living in a simulation? A flurry of headlines says no: we need no longer worry about our lives being mere software spawned by a highly advanced supercomputer.
These stories stem from a recent Science Advances paper about simulating quantum physics. One science magazine extrapolated from this to suggest that storing information about just a few hundred electrons needs a computer memory made up of more atoms than exist in the universe – thus, simulating the universe is impossible.
But the paper only claims that a specific, limited type of simulation won’t work due to technical and hardware issues. It says that, within our current understanding of physical reality, there are certain quantum problems that cannot be simulated on a classical computer using a specific quantum algorithm, because it would require too much memory. The paper doesn’t even mention electrons.
While pleased at the coverage of their work, authors Zohar Ringel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and Dmitry Kovrizhin at the University of Oxford told New Scientist they are a bit taken aback at the conclusions the media is drawing. Asking whether we live in a simulation is not even a scientific question, Ringel says.
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