Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• The true nature of our universe as been an open debate for millennia, and recently, scientists and philosophers have pondered whether it might be a hyper-realistic simulation perpetuated by some super-advanced species.
• A new study suggests that, at least mathematically speaking, this idea doesn’t hold up, as some facets of reality can’t be explain purely algorithmically.
• Because any simulation—no matter how advanced—would still rely on algorithms, the researchers suggest that this provides strong support that reality is very much real.

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Is the universe a simulation? At first glance, the idea seems preposterous. Then again, within just a few decades, we’ve created entire digital worlds, AI has started to blur the line of what is real, and scientists have continued to probe the fabric of reality down to the quantum level. Factor in centuries or even millennia of similar technological progress—multiplied by the two trillion or so galaxies in the universe—and the idea that maybe our lived experience is simply a hyper-realistic simulation by some ultra-advanced alien species can feel a bit less like pure speculation and more head-scratchingly plausible.

The idea isn’t new—everything from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to the Wachowski sisters’ The Matrix ponders the concept. But this simulation theory has taken on some seriousness within the relatively new field of information physics, which aims to explore the role that information plays in the machinations of our universe. Some scientists have proposed that gravity arises from computation rules, while others suggest that information could explain things like dark matter and dark energy. But the team of researchers behind a new study from scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) now claims that they’ve mathematically proven that simulation theory is impossible. Their work is published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics.

“This idea was once thought to lie beyond the reach of scientific inquiry,” Mir Faizal, the lead author of the study from UBC, said in a press statement. “However, our recent research has demonstrated that it can, in fact, be scientifically addressed.”

The question explored at the heart of this study is whether or not all facets of reality can be described in algorithmic means. Any simulation, no matter how sophisticated, would rely on algorithms. So, if you can prove that certain fundamental principles are non-algorithmic in nature, that would suggest we’re all flesh-and-blood-real after all. Using advanced mathematical concepts—including Godel’s incompleteness theorems, Tarski’s undefinability theorem, and Chaitin’s information-theoretic incompleteness—the study identifies limitations on what algorithms can describe.

“Together, these results imply that a wholly algorithmic ‘Theory of Everything’ is impossible: certain facets of reality will remain computationally undecidable and can be accessed only through non-algorithmic understanding,” the authors wrote. “Because any putative simulation of the universe would itself be algorithmic, this framework also implies that the universe cannot be a simulation.”

To take things one step further, the authors invoke the metaphysical idea of the “Platonic realm” of mathematics—a realm that’s more “real” than our own and from which space and time itself emerge. Could it be possible that the rules in this realm could be, in and of themselves, algorithmic?

“Drawing on mathematical theorems related to incompleteness and indefinability, we demonstrate that a fully consistent and complete description of reality cannot be achieved through computation alone,” Faizal said in a press statement. “It requires non-algorithmic understanding, which by definition is beyond algorithmic computation and therefore cannot be simulated. Hence, this universe cannot be a simulation.”

This isn’t likely to be the definite last word on the simulation hypothesis, especially since the idea conjures up such great sci-fi fodder. But it does provide a compelling piece of metaphysical evidence that we might be living in universe prime after all.

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.