If we were in a computer simulation right now, how would we even know? Well, University of Bonn nuclear physicist Silas Beane and some of his colleagues have come up with a test that exploits a feature of said simulations; their need to be discretized. In the physical world, distances can be infinitesimally small, but not so in the world of computers where things need to have a limited set of values. Researchers use a lattice (i.e., 3D graph paper) to model how the strong nuclear force works over time on a femto scale. As the scale gets smaller and smaller, the simulation eventually hits a limit on how much energy particles can have. This phenomenon has an analog in the physical world called the Greisen-Zatsepin-Zuzmin (GZK) cut off, and Beane and company believe we can test to see if it behaves the way we expect from theory, or the way we’d expect in a discretized model like a computer simulation. If the latter is true, it would provide evidence that we are all stuck in a computer:
Physicists devise test to see if we’re living in ‘The Matrix’ | The Verge

Source: theverge.com

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