‘WHERE ONCE THERE WAS GOD, NOW THERE IS CODE’
THE LURE OF LIFE IN THE MATRIX

The urge to believe that we may be programmed is, at its heart, a crisis of meaning, writes Iain Overton

A quietly unsettling paper recently appeared in AIP Advances, an open-access, peer-reviewed scientific mega journal published by the American Institute of Physics. Its author, Dr Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth, proposed a theory that, if true, could upend our understanding of gravity – and perhaps even God.

Gravity, he argued, is not a force acting at a distance, nor a curvature of space-time, but a computational process: the universe may function like a cosmic computer, drawing matter together to reduce informational complexity.

An online article on the study published by the University of Portsmouth carried the headline “scientist suggests gravity further supports theory we are living in a simulated universe”.