**From ancient Greek philosopher **Plato to Neo, hero of the dystopian film fantasy The Matrix, humans have long pondered the true nature of reality. Can we trust what we see, taste, touch, smell, and hear to be real—or have we not truly grasped “how deep the rabbit hole goes?”

The most modern formulation of this existential thought exercise is the simulation hypothesis. It suggests that what we perceive as reality is actually a hyper-realistic, uber-sophisticated simulation designed by beings that are far more advanced than us—in unfathomable ways. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom first put this idea into words back in 2003, and since then, the hypothesis has gathered attention from some of the greatest scholars alive. However, there’s a wide chasm between philosophy and proven science, and to prove such a controversial hypothesis, you need to build a bridge of evidence.

For the past six years, Melvin Vopson, PhD, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., has been trying to construct this crucial piece of empirical infrastructure. His latest addition to the simulation hypothesis revealed a potential new role for gravity. In a paper he published in AIP Advances in April, Vopson explores the idea that gravitational attraction effectively reduces information entropy—in other words, it enforces computational order on information chaos.

Entropy is a measure of disorder in an isolated system. For example, if you have a neat bedroom, it has low entropy. But over time, if your room becomes messier because you aren’t expending energy to tidy it up, its increasing disorganization indicates a rise in entropy. This idea extends to information, Vopson says, but inversely.

“If you take an area of space with some objects in it, they will have information entropy associated with this information,” Vopson says. That information registers the properties of matter in space, such as velocity and position. Information has a really tiny mass, but it’s enough to be measurable, according to the paper. But if the objects cluster together due to gravity, that information entropy is reduced, so the objects will have more order, he says.

If true (and it’s a pretty big “if”), Vopson’s new gravitational study would shake the foundations of the currently accepted view of the universe. In his paper, Vopson writes that his new work could have ramifications for some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, including dark energy, quantum gravity, and black hole thermodynamics.

“WE HAVE A PUBLIC DUTY TO PUBLISH RESULTS, PUBLISH IDEAS, BRING THEM INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN SO WE CAN DEBATE THEM, SO WE CAN DISPROVE THEM.”

The new paper also pushes science a bit closer to an understanding of a simulated universe—something that took Vopson by complete surprise. Having a deep background in condensed matter physics and digital data storage, Vopson once worked on the full-spectrum of digital storage technologies as a senior research and development scientist at Seagate, a U.S. data storage company. He didn’t intend to study the simulated universe idea.

“It was completely out of my reasoning,” Vopson says. “All of this work in condensed matter physics and data storage, it shaped up my thinking and understanding of digital technology and information … the reason I was able to do this was I was at the right time at the right place.”

That time arrived in 2019, when Vopson—inspired by the work of computer scientist Claude Shannon, the father of information theory—developed his mass-energy-information-equivalence principle. Then, he followed it up with his “Second Law of Infodynamics.” It’s a title he admits is a bit ambitious. While the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the entropy—or disorder—of any system remains constant or increases over time, the concept of information turns that law on its head.

**🔮 Check Out Our New Video Series, **Pop Mech Explains: PrecognitionYou’ve probably had that eerie feeling before—knowing what’s about to happen before it actually does. Flashes of deja vu. A text from someone you were just thinking about. A dream predicting the future. Coincidence? Or something deeper? Across four chapters, we investigate the science and speculation behind those “gut feelings.”

Go Down the Rabbit Hole With Us

“The Second Law of Information Dynamics requires information entropy to decrease, it requires less computational power, and less data storage,” Vopson says, adding, “I was a bit too brave. I postulated with a collaborator of mine that this is a universal law, but I only gave two examples … since then, all my efforts were geared toward finding other systems where this is valid.”

That drive to find supporting evidence for his presumptuously declared “law” of the universe is what actually led Vopson into the scientific realm of the simulation hypothesis. This exploration first bore fruit in 2022—because of the Covid-19 pandemic. After analyzing the readily available data related to the mutations of the SARS-CoV-2, the microscopic menace behind the pandemic, Vopson determined that when the virus mutated, information entropy decreased. According to Vopson, if the universe was a super-sophisticated simulation, it would require built-in optimization and compression to reduce complexity. So perhaps these genetic mutations are evidence of that optimization at work, since mutations appeared to decrease information entropy.

Vopson’s concept draws on Shannon’s information theory and also the German-American physicist Rolf Landauer’s proposed connection between thermodynamics and information. In this new paper, Vopson applies his hypothesis to the concept of “entropic gravity,” an idea first explored in 2011 by Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde. The basic concept is that gravity *isn’t *a fundamental force, but an emergent phenomenon. Deeper processes, perhaps one like the Second Law of Infodynamics, are what give rise to gravity, Vopson argues.

Despite six years of these kinds of rapid-fire bold claims, Vopson is very aware that his ideas are far from certain. He’s the first to mention that many of his studies’ titles contain question marks, and that he often writes disclaimers in his conclusions that the simulation hypothesis is just that—a hypothesis. So far, he says, he has gotten surprisingly little pushback for his ideas, but he welcomes any and all criticism.

His ultimate mission is to expand humanity’s knowledge in any way possible—even if that means definitively proving that our universe is the real deal.

“We have a public duty to publish results, publish ideas, bring them into the public domain so we can debate them, so we can disprove them,” Vopson says. “Otherwise we won’t make any progress.”

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.