“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room.”
So says Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in sci-fi classic ‘The Matrix’ as he offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo the choice to find out just how “deep the rabbit hole goes”.
Now, just as Neo discovered that the “life” he’d been living was little more than an algorithmic construct, scientists and philosophers are arguing that we could be stuck inside a simulation ourselves.
In a paper published earlier this month, physicist Melvin Vopson, of the University of Portsmouth, offered scientific evidence for a philosophical theory known as the simulation hypothesis.
This, in a nutshell, posits that the entire universe and our objective reality are just super-advanced virtual reality illusions.
Elon Musk is among the well-known fans of the theory, which – as Dr Vopson notes in his paper – has been “gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry”.
The university lecturer also pointed out that recent developments in a branch of science known as information physics “appear to support this possibility”.