For years now, science fiction writers and Silicon Valley billionaires who want to seem really deep, man, have theorized that we’re all just NPCs in some advanced civilization’s cosmic video game. Just a bunch of ones and zeros bumping into each other, who could probably be deleted off a hard drive with a few clicks.
A study from physicist Mir Faizal and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia contends that simulation theory is mathematically impossible.
Faizal’s team argues that the universe cannot be simulated because reality itself is not fully computable. The research, published in The Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, also dismantles the long-standing hope for a neat “Theory of Everything” that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics.
It’s a difficult concept to wrap your head around, so let me try saying it another way: you can’t explain everything from within everything.
Is Our Reality a Simulation? Scientists Looked Into It.
Faizal’s team took that logic and applied it to all of physics. If the laws of reality are computational, meaning they all just come down to pure numbers and mathematics, they should, in theory, be complete and self-contained. But since computation itself is limited by these incompleteness theorems, there must be aspects of the universe that can’t be captured by any algorithm, no matter how advanced.
That means any hypothetical alien coder trying to simulate our universe would hit a hard wall of unknowable truths. You can’t render what math itself says can’t be rendered. “Any simulation is inherently algorithmic—it must follow programmed rules,” Faizal says. “But since the fundamental level of reality is based on non-algorithmic understanding, the universe cannot be, and could never be, a simulation.”
Instead, Faizal proposes what he calls a “Meta Theory of Everything”—a kind of conceptual layer above computation. This non-algorithmic understanding sits outside spacetime and logic, able to judge what’s true without following the rules.
It’s physics with a little bit of mythical, magical thinking sprinkled—not because the universe is running on any literal magic, but because the math says that reality can’t be fit into a neat little box of understanding, so naturally, there must be something while they’re going on that we can’t even begin to fathom.
Assuming this is correct, it means that we’re not living in the matrix because reality is way too complicated, too weird, too random, for any mega cosmic supercomputer to handle, and definitely way more complex than any cosmic programmer could ever create.
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