Nobel Prize Just Given for Proving the Universe Isn't Real!

The odds that you're living in a simulation border on 100%. Meaning this, all of this is almost certainly not real. In October of 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for proving that the universe renders like a video game. The technical phrase is that the universe is not locally real. The existence of an object and its position and movement are merely a set of probabilities until something in the system observes or interacts with them. Not only does that discovery increase the odds that were video game characters living in a simulation, it proves that Albert Einstein was wrong and not about a minor detail about the fundamental nature of reality itself. Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life insisting that the universe had to be locally real, that objects exist independently. They're out there in the world knowably. Our intuitions tell us that he must be right. That nothing can influence something else telepathically across vast distances instantaneously. But experimental evidence proves that what Einstein called spooky action at a distance actually is true. Reality does not work how we thought it does and it calls absolutely everything into question. Let's dive deep to understand why. Welcome to part one, the real world. To understand what this all means, we need to define two words precisely, local and real. Let's start with local. Locality is the assumption that things can only affect and be affected by things physically near them. Your coffee cools because the air around it is cooler. Not because of something that happened in Tokyo, not because of something that happened yesterday or out in the vastness of space. Things change because of what is physically adjacent to them right now. Information travels at a cost. It requires time and energy to move from one place to another. If you want to hug or punch someone, even just down the street, you've got to get up and go there. You have to deal with weather, traffic, a sore knee if you have one. But that's all required if you want to influence something down the road. Now, you could call someone and have them deliver the hug or punch, but even that requires your voice to be turned into zeros and ones and sent across the distance using the electromagnetic field. None of this stuff happens by magic. It happens in a knowable fashion. Distance is a barrier. Objects are independent, self-contained things that only interact with their immediate surroundings. or so it seems. That assumption is so deeply baked into how we experience the world that we don't even think about it. It just feels like common sense. Now, I imagine so far you're all with me. So, now let's get to the weirder stuff. Let's define what it means to be real. Realism is the assumption that objects have definite states whether or not anyone is looking at them. The chair exists when you leave the room. When you stop this video, you know I'm still going to exist out here. somewhere. The moon is up in the sky whether you're looking at it or not. Reality is continuous. It's objective and permanent. It's out there waiting to be discovered. You don't create it by observing it. It already exists. Again, it's an idea so obvious that taking the time to explain it feels strange. Those two assumptions, locality and realism, are the bedrock of how human beings understand the entire universe. The problem is they're both wrong. Ultimately, it was developing my first video game that made all of this click for me and convinced me that we probably are living inside of a simulation. I have the chills now. That is so crazy. Here's exactly what gamedev teaches you. When you build a game world, you have to make a fundamental decision about how that world exists. Do objects exist permanently, fully rendered, fully real, fully tracked all the time, whether or not a player is anywhere near them, or do you only render and resolve what's actually being observed by the player in that moment? Now, every serious game engine chooses the second option because the first option is computationally catastrophic. You cannot maintain full permanent object states [music] for an entire world simultaneously without melting your computer. The processing cost would be insane truly on a level that we cannot comprehend. So instead, you build a system where objects outside of the player's view exist only as potential, as a probability set, as data that's waiting to be processed, but ultimately it's just code. The moment a player needs to see or interact with that object, then the system runs the code, which is full of math, and the object gets resolved into something definite, something real. Now, here's the thing about distance in a game engine. It feels real on screen. Some objects seem close while other objects seem far away. Space really seems to separate them. But underneath that representation of space, there actually is no distance. The CPU and the GPU are processing everything in exactly the same place. The separation you see is an illusion created by how the world is displayed on screen. Remember that scene in the Matrix where the kid says, "You only need to realize the truth that there is no spoon." That's exactly what we're talking about here. What we look at is just the display. It's not what's really happening. What's really happening is computation and math. Underneath the visual layer of the game, the system has access to all of the rules and the information simultaneously, regardless of how far apart the objects on the screen are. It's all being processed in the same space. The staggering vastness of a video game world is actually entirely contained inside of a computer that can sit on your lap. Two objects inside of a game that seem incredibly distant from one another are actually in the same space computationally. They may appear to be on opposite sides of the universe from inside the game, but in actuality, they're just data structures sitting next to each other in memory getting processed by the same chips and governed by the same system. The illusion of distance is just that, an illusion. Which means there's no true locality in a game engine. There can't be. Locality is simply something you deliberately simulate to make the world feel believable. Now, realism, objects having definite permanent states, is simply something you have to fake because true permanence is far too computationally expensive to maintain. Now, the Nobel Prize in physics was just awarded for proving [music] that our universe is designed the exact same way a video game is. To understand how we know this to be true, let's look at the experiments that earned the Nobel Prize. Welcome to part two, the experiments. In 1801, a British scientist named Thomas Young entered the chat of one of the oldest arguments in physics and settled it. The debate was simple. Is light made of particles or is it a wave? Newton said it was particles, but Young was on the side that disagreed. So, he built an experiment to prove it was a wave. He fired a beam of light at a barrier that had two narrow slits cut into it. Behind the barrier was a screen. His logic was simple. If light is particles, you'll get two bands on the screen, one for each slit, like paintballs being shot through the gaps. But if light is a wave, you'll get something different. Waves spread out. They overlap. They interfere with one another, reinforcing in some places and canceling out in others, like ripples in a pond that are colliding. It's known as an interference pattern and is sometimes referred to as zebra stripes. So, what was the result of this very famous double slit experiment? It was an interference pattern. Young was right. Alternating stripes of light and dark appeared spread across the entire screen. Light had a wave signature. Newton, of all people, was wrong. Young's experiment was celebrated. The debate was seemingly settled and physics just moved on until a hundred years later when a guy with crazy ass hair named Albert Einstein blew the whole thing up again. In 1905, the same year he published his paper on special relativity, Einstein proved that despite the interference pattern in the double slit experiment, light also comes in discrete individual packets of energy known as particles. He called them photons. The work was so foundational it won Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921. Now physics had a problem. Young proved that light is a wave. Einstein proved light is made of individual particles. Both experiments were rigorous. Both results were real, which meant light was somehow both things at once, a wave and a particle, depending on how you looked at it. Now, that's strange enough on its own, but what came next absolutely broke people's brains, including Einstein's. If light is made of individual photons, single discrete particles, then what happens when you fire one at a time through Young's two slits? No beam, no group, just one photon. Then you pause, then you shoot another, one particle at a time with nothing to possibly cause any interference. Guess what happens? The interference pattern should disappear. Obviously, you need waves overlapping to get that interference pattern. A single particle just going to go through one slit, hit the screen, you'd expect two bands, not the zebra stripes, of an interference pattern. In 1986, physicists Granger, Roger, and Aspect ran exactly that experiment. With the precision required to test it properly, the interference pattern still appeared. What? Even when you shoot one photon at a time, an interference pattern slowly emerges on the screen anyway, which means each individual particle was somehow passing through both slits simultaneously and interfering with itself. How is that physically possible? Physicists call this superp position. The idea that a quantum particle doesn't have a single definite location until it's measured. It exists as a wave of probability. potentially here, potentially there until something forces it to commit to one specific place. This is actually how the universe works. That led to an obvious question. If we just watched which slit each particle actually went through, wouldn't that tell us what was really happening? So, they set up a detector, a device that would record which slit each individual particle passed through. The problem, as soon as they set up the detectors, the interference pattern completely disappeared. For whatever weird reason, the moment the system captured information about the particles path, the particles stopped behaving like a wave and started behaving like an individual particle. Two clean bands, no interference. It's as if the particles knew they were being watched and suddenly decided to act differently. It's like the toys in Toy Story act like lifeless toys when humans are around, but then jump up and prove themselves to be truly alive when the humans are gone. When researchers turn the detector off, the interference pattern of the wave comes roaring back. Turn the detector back on, the interference pattern disappears again. This has been replicated thousands of times in labs all over the world. The result is always the same. What's even crazier is that the particle doesn't need a conscious human observer to collapse into a definite state. It doesn't need eyes or awareness or intention. It just needs any physical interaction that captures information about the particles path. A detector, a stray photon, anything that records which way it went by measurement or interaction. The moment that information exists anywhere in the system, the wave collapses. It becomes specific. The particle commits. It gets fully rendered into reality as something specific and not just a wave of probabilities. The universe isn't responding to consciousness like a game engine. It's responding to information processing. We'll get back to the show in a second, but first, let's talk about the thing your business just can't survive without. I go live 3 days a week at 7 a.m. and every single morning you guys show up. You're there ready. And if my connection drops in the middle of that live stream, the moment's gone forever. You do not get a second [music] chance with live content. When you're a digital media company, your internet isn't a utility. It's your entire operation. Every live stream, every interview, every piece of content flows through that connection. One drop and I lose you. I lose the momentum and I lose the trust that I've spent years building with this community. And I know a lot of you are in the same position. Your business depends on staying connected. That's why I trust AT&T Business. They're built for business owners who cannot afford downtime, reliable connectivity, simple setup, and the kind of dependability that helps you stop worrying about your infrastructure and start focusing on your people. [music] Impact Theory is powered by AT&T Business, built to work. Get AT&T Business at business.at.com. We will get right back to the show in a second, but first, let's talk about surviving holiday travel and snacks. You can't control your holiday travel. Flights get delayed, plans fall apart, you end up stuck in some airport terminal, watching the clock while your only food options are overpriced. Garbage. 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Everything else remains in superp position in the world of possibility and not actuality. When the player's perspective requires an object to exist, then the system resolves it. Not because the player is conscious, but because the system needs the data to know where to place things. The universe appears to operate on identical logic. But as strange as the double slit experiment is, it wasn't enough on its own to prove what was happening. You could still come up with potential explanations like maybe there's something about the detector that's physically disturbing the particle. Maybe it's a measurement problem. Maybe we're missing something. Einstein certainly thought so. But people tried things like leaving the detector in place but turning it on or off. And when it was off, the interference pattern would show up. And when it was on, the interference pattern would disappear again. Then came the experiment that made our actual reality impossible to ignore. In the 1970s, physicist John Archabald Wheeler proposed a brilliant variation of the double slit experiment called the delayed choice experiment. It was a very difficult experiment to run, so it took decades for someone to pull it off, but once they did, it turned everything upside down. Wheeler asked a simple question. What if you don't decide whether to turn on the detector until after the particle has already passed through the slits? Think about what that's actually asking. The particle has already made its journey. It has already gone through the barrier. It has chosen one slit or the other. Whatever it did, wave or particle, it has already done it. Now, after the fact, you decide whether you were watching or not. Does it matter? The crazy thing is it does. In 2007, physicists at the institute doique in France ran this experiment with the precision required to actually test it. The result was unambiguous. When the researchers turned on the detector after the particle had already passed through the slits, it retroactively behaved like a particle when passing through the slits. When they chose not to observe it, it retroactively behaved like a wave when passing through the slits. The decision made after the fact determined what the particle had done before the fact. The present detection somehow reached back in time and changed the past. There is no locally real mechanical explanation for that. There's no story about detectors physically disturbing particles that accounts for a decision made after the particle already traveled through the barrier. The only thing that changed was whether the particle was monitored or not and thus whether the system was forced to fully render the particle or not. And the particle's history changes accordingly retroactively. While realism and locality can't exist in the face of this reality, if you assume we're inside of a simulation or a game engine, it suddenly all makes perfect sense. A simulation doesn't have a static past. It simply has mathematical probabilities that are only run when you need to determine where everything should be right now in this moment. When processed, these probabilities collapse into a definitive solution that reaches back into the simulated past to say, well, if I've ended up in this state here where you're measuring me, that means I must have done these things in the [music] past. And it suddenly makes those things true. That is how the actual universe works. It only runs the computations that are necessary to describe the current thing that is being monitored by some element of the system. And if it has to reach into the past to define things there, it will do so. But there's still a missing piece of the puzzle. So far, we have particles behaving strangely in isolation. We have an observation collapsing wave functions. We have the past taking concrete shape only when it's necessary to establish the present aspect that the universe needs to render in this moment. What we don't have is proof that the universe isn't actually physical. To get all the way to this being plausibly a simulation, we have to prove that distant objects can be processed causally together instantly despite being radically far apart. I'm talking like opposite ends of the universe far apart. Something that would only happen if the distance was actually an illusion. So, strap in because things are about to get really weird. Welcome to part three, the Nobel Prize. In 1935, Einstein wrote a paper designed to prove that quantum mechanics was incomplete. He wasn't arguing the experiments were wrong. He accepted the data. What he refused to accept was the interpretation. His position was that particles had to have definite properties before they were measured. He insisted that reality existed independently of observation and that quantum mechanics simply hadn't found the hidden variables yet. The full picture was out there. We just didn't have it. To make his case, Einstein and two colleagues, Boris Podilski and Nathan Rosen, designed a thought experiment. It became known as the EPR paradox. It went like this. Quantum mechanics predicts that two particles can become entangled. Meaning their properties are linked. If you measure one, you instantly know something about the other, no matter how far apart they are. And the relationship between the two is causal. If one is spinning one way, because of the laws of physics, the other must be spinning in the other direction. Einstein said that was absurd. For that to work, either the particles had some kind of hidden agreement baked in from the start, predetermined instructions that told each one how to behave, or measuring one particle would somehow send information to the other faster than the speed of light. The first option meant quantum mechanics was incomplete. The second option violated special relativity, which Einstein also invented and was definitely not about to abandon. It just explained too much. His conclusion, there had to be some hidden variables. Reality had to be locally real. The alternative was just too insane to accept. For nearly 30 years, no one could prove him right or wrong. It was a philosophical standoff. Then in 1964, a physicist named John Bell published a paper with a key insight. Bell had figured out how to turn Einstein's philosophical argument into a testable mathematical prediction. He proved that if hidden variables existed, if particles really did carry predetermined instructions, then measurements taken on entangled pairs would only correlate up to a specific statistical threshold. He called it a bell inequality. It was a hard ceiling on how correlated two particles could be if they were just following pre-written rules. If experiments found correlations above that ceiling, hidden variables were dead. They just couldn't be true and Einstein would be wrong and the universe would definitively not be locally real. John Clauser ran the first real test in 1972 out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He fired entangled pairs of photons at detectors on opposite sides of a room and measured their correlations. The bell inequality was violated. The correlations were too strong. No hidden instructions could explain it. But there were loopholes. Maybe the detectors were influencing each other. Maybe there was something subtle being missed. So physicists got to work. Alan Aspect closed the most important loophole in the 1980s. He designed an experiment where the measurement settings were switched after the entangled photons had already left their source in billionths of a second. Way too fast for a signal to pass between them. Too fast for any pre-written instructions to account for the change. The bell inequality was violated again. Anton Zelinger went even further. In 2017, his team used light emitted by stars hundreds of light years away to randomly set the measurement parameters of the experiment. The logic was airtight. If some hidden cosmic conspiracy was faking entanglement, it would have needed to be set in motion before those stars emitted that light. Centuries before anyone designed this test, before Einstein was even born, didn't matter. The Bell inequality was still violated. In October of 2022, Aspect Clauser and Zelinger were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for this body of work. The official citation was for experiments with entangled photons establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science. Scientific American ran the headline, "The universe is not locally real." And the physics Nobel Prize winners proved it. Hopefully this far in you guys see that that's not flowery language. That's the conclusion of the most rigorous experimental physics of the last 50 years. The universe is not locally real. But what does that actually mean? Well, it means Einstein was wrong. Particles do not carry hidden predetermined instructions. There is no pre-written scripts that makes it possible for distant objects to appear to be causally affecting one another. Instead, objects do not have definite properties before they're measured. And entangled particles, no matter how far apart they are, are not two separate things that happen to behave similarly. They're one system. Measuring one instantaneously determines causally the state of the other, not because a signal traveled between them, but because they were never truly separate objects to begin with. distance, as it turns out, is an illusion, which is exactly what every game developer knows about their game. In a game engine, two objects on opposite sides of the world, they're not really separate. They're data structures processed in the same place, governed by the same system. As we were talking about before, the distance between them is just a representation on the screen. Underneath, the system has access to everything at once. It's all connected. There's no actual separation. There's no true locality. It's not real. It's just a unified computational system rendering the appearance of distance and objects. No one can say definitively that our universe is a simulation. But we can say that it behaves exactly like a simulation. Objects appear real on screen. Distance appears real on screen. But underneath the visual layer of reality, at the quantum level, where the actual rules live, separation is merely simulated. Entangled particles on opposite ends of the universe are not communicating across distance. They're being processed together by a centralized system whenever observation requires it. That's what it means to not be locally real. The universe has no true locality because it's all being processed in the same place. And it's not true realism because nothing has a definite state until the system needs to render [music] it. Those are not the properties of a physical universe sitting out there waiting to be discovered. Those are the properties of a simulation that remains energy efficient by processing only what is required moment to moment. So, welcome to part four. The universe is much cooler than you think. Elon Musk has said publicly that the odds we're living in base reality are about 1 in a billion. In 2003, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostonramm explained why >> we have computers in the external world that those computers are getting faster and better with passing time. >> Boston started with a single observation. Computing power has roughly doubled every 2 years for decades. If that trend continues, or even if it slows down dramatically, future civilizations will eventually be capable of running simulations of entire worlds complete with conscious inhabitants who mistake this simulation for base reality. If that's true, he argued, then one of three things must be the case. Option one, virtually every civilization destroys itself before reaching that capability. some catastrophic ceiling of some kind, war, pandemic, rogue AI, whatever, it ends the game before it gets there. Every time, everywhere in the universe, without exception. Option two, virtually every civilization that does reach that capability chooses never to run simulations. Some universal constraint stops them. Every advanced civilization ever, indefinitely. Option three, we're almost certainly living in a simulation right now because the math is brutal. If even one civilization survives and runs even a modest number of simulations, they're going to produce vastly more simulated realities than base realities. The math goes something like this. If advanced civilizations can run a simulation, they are likely to run many of them. Here in our own reality, we run simulations of everything from traffic to weather. So our own trajectory suggests an advanced civilization would inevitably run potentially millions of simulations. Within those simulations, the actors inside will build simulations until it simulations all the way down. In the face of that, the probability of any conscious mind existing in base reality becomes vanishingly small. The ratio isn't even close. The probability that you exist in the one base reality out of all the possible places a conscious mind could find itself approaches zero. The crazy part is that Bostonramm laid out that argument before the Nobel Prize was given for proving that our universe operates on the same computational system that a simulation would require. He was just working from pure probability. It's so wild that physics then came along after and proved that the structure of the universe makes this hypothesis even more likely. Here's where all of this leaves us. Either we live inside of a simulation built by some intelligence operating at a level that is way above our own or the universe is so fundamentally computational in its nature that the distinction between a simulation and how our universe actually operates just disappears. So maybe this isn't technically a simulation, but at some point does it really even matter? There's no structural difference that we can discern between the two at this point. The reality at its base layer isn't matter and energy. It's mathematics, calculation, and information processing itself. Either way, the universe we're taught to believe in is gone. It never existed. In its place is something far more extraordinary. A reality that renders on demand, where distance and many other things are just illusions, where nothing is definite until the system needs it to be. where the past resolves itself backward from the present. To me, all of this is thrilling. Think of all the insane things that are possible inside of a video game that we currently think of in reality as impossible. Well, before Einstein's discoveries, the entire atomic age would have seemed impossible. It would have seemed like magic. But now, it's just our common reality. So the question becomes, if this is a simulation, what things will be possible in our future that currently seem like magic? All right, if you want to see me explore ideas like this in real time, make sure that you hit that subscribe button and join me Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7 a.m. Pacific time. I hope to see you there. Till next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. >> If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Right now, the United States is at the same kind of instructional inflection point that has preceded every major social eruption in recorded history. >> All you had to do was pass enough toing.