A new physics paper suggests that we may all be living in the ultimate 4X strategy game after all

Have you heard of the simulation hypothesis? It's the idea that the universe, as we perceive it, is essentially a form of simulated reality and it's been explored in genuine scientific research, philosophical texts, and major plot devices in numerous films. Well, a new physics research paper on the nature of information claims that if its findings were to be empirically validated, it would be a major piece of evidence for the notion that we're all living in the grandest giant 4X strategy game of all time.

News of the paper's release (via MSN) has been understandably popular in general science reporting. The researcher in question, Dr Melvin Vopson, has spent a good portion of his career in physics investigating information theory, going as far as to propose a universal law called the second law of information dynamics, based on an earlier theory of his called the mass-energy-information equivalence principle. 

The gist of that is information is the same as energy, and thus has mass; Dr Vopson has suggested that this could be explored in an experiment by which information is removed from a storage device, which is recorded for any changes in mass.

Dr Vopson is convinced, as one would expect, that his findings have significant implications (for example, the 'missing mass' problem in cosmology is apparently solved by his theory), not least being the suggestion that, should his work be validated, then it would go a long way to showing that the simulation hypothesis is more than a mere idea.

«The second law of infodynamics appears to be manifesting universally and is, in fact, a cosmological necessity, we could conclude that this points to the fact that the entire universe appears to be a simulated construct,» he writes.

«A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimization and compression mechanism in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements.»

Dr Vopson doesn't exactly present an