r/SimulationTheory • u/Dover299 • 3d ago
Discussion Why does gravity point to simulation theory?
People tell me scientist studying gravity say the model now points to simulation theory?
What problems is there with gravity? Why does gravity point to simulation theory?
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u/HouseHippoBeliever 3d ago
Gravity itself doesn't point to simulation theory, but I have seen two reasons why it is often talked about.
Our best description of gravity is general relativity, but unfortunately that theory is extremely mathematical and IMO out of reach of anyone who hasn't spent decades studying math (this is coming from someone with a Masters degree in physics).
So, when describing how gravity works to a pop science audience, science communicators are forced to lean heavily into analogies that are arguably the "best possible" low-math description, but unfortunately are quite far removed from the actual physics.
The analogies that get used tend to overlap with how actual physics simulations work in some cases. A big example of this is video game physics, because people love video games.
So you've got lay people with a mental model of how gravity works which is very similar to how video game optimizations work, so you can really see how easy it is to jump to the conclusion that gravity could be evidence of a simulation.
The other big reason isn't unique to simulation theory as it applies to basically all religions equally. It's basically that gravity despite being so studied is still such a mystery to physicists, and people have a strong psychological urge to explain gaps in understanding with whatever they subconsciously want to be the truth.
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u/jedburghofficial 3d ago
I have never seen gravity compared to video game physics. Do you have any examples of this happening?
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u/astralchunk 2d ago
Me neither, that's not at all how it's generally explained to any level of audience.
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u/Dover299 3d ago
That interesting so when we are not looking at it or measuring it gravity is not there only when looking at it or measuring it is there like video game?
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u/realitypater 3d ago
Absolutely nothing in HouseHippoBeliever's comment suggested any such thing. Most people think we understand gravity because we know how to code an approximation of it into things like games. Physicists know our understanding of gravity is incomplete, and some people tend to swap out "We don't know" for bad or superstitious answers.
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u/Even_Opportunity_893 3d ago
It can be used to understand what's “inside the simulation” but it doesn't really make a difference for what is really outside of it.
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u/Meowweredoomed 3d ago
I would propose that the reason for it is we still don't have a complete understanding of gravity in the standard model.
What its force carrier is, why it is so weak but still influences everything, what exactly "bends" in spacetime when gravity affects it.
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u/MaybeNo2485 3d ago
Among the newer approaches to quantum gravity, the emergent/entropic family is the one I find promising; Jacobson's thermodynamic derivation of Einstein's equations, Verlinde's entropic gravity, the entanglement-based spacetime work, etc. Gravity comes out as a statistical, thermodynamic side effect of how entropy and entanglement are distributed in quantum fields rather than a force transmitted by a particle, which would elegantly explain why quantizing gravity as a force has never worked; there was never a force to quantize.
Not immediately sure how any of that would relate to simulation theory, though.
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u/Gullible_Fishing_799 3d ago
Which scientists? What new theory? Or what have you seen on the subject?
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u/GatePorters 3d ago
Scientists aren’t a monolith. It isn’t scientific consensus that simulation theory is real or that gravity is evidence for it.
And when many scientists speak about simulation theory, it’s not like computer simulation. Moreso that we are within a system that has rules and we can’t necessarily study ALL of those rules because we are a part of it.
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u/JupiterandMars1 3d ago
“People” tell you? Really? Why, are you the “tell him what scientists studying gravity say” guy?
There may be a scientist here and there that believe that. Just like there are scientists that believe in religion.
It doesn’t have any meaning or bearing on reality what individual humans choose to believe.
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u/SunRev 3d ago
Is it because the speed of gravity is the same speed as the speed of light?
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u/MaybeNo2485 3d ago edited 3d ago
The name "speed of light" is an unfortunate historical artifact; "speed of causality" is more accurate. What it really describes is a function that determines whether two 4D points in spacetime can possibly be causally connected at all, which happens to look like a speed limit from our perspective of 3D space evolving through time. The value itself falls out of (permittivity_of_space * permeability_of_space)-0.5.
The only reason anything can ever propogate through space slower than that is when something creates a drag on its transformation through 3D space, which is exactly what mass does. Anything without mass has its causal influence expand at the "speed of light." We only named it after light because that happened to be the most prominent massless phenomenon we knew at the time.
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u/Vancecookcobain 3d ago
I think the idea is that gravity is just information slowing down the processing speed of the rendering...like lag
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u/MaybeNo2485 3d ago edited 3d ago
To expand on that for people unfamiliar:
Clocks near mass run slower, and for everyday purposes that time dilation basically is gravity. So if you buy the premise that the universe is information processing (Wheeler's "it from bit"), the rest follows pretty naturally. Mass is concentrated information; dense regions take more steps to update; and you can't observe the extra steps from inside, because your own clock is built from the same laggy updates. The load only shows up as your clocks running slow relative to everywhere else. A black hole is the limit case: maximum density with time stopping at the horizon resulting in a frame that never renders.
The idea has respectable company. Verlinde's entropic gravity and Jacobson's thermodynamic derivation both treat gravity as emergent bookkeeping rather than a fundamental force. The one strain is that lag seems to imply a master clock, and relativity says there isn't one; however, that's patchable. Make it lag with no privileged reference frame, visible only by comparing clocks across regions, which is the only way we detect time dilation anyway.
Personally I'd take it as reason to look harder at theories framing gravity as an emergent phenomenon tied to entropy in quantum fields since that's proportional to information density in a region, rather than as evidence for simulation theory; though I can see where that interpretation comes from.
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u/Vancecookcobain 3d ago
That's well explained. I remember reading some articles on it and the lag analogy was the best way I could conceptualize it in my mind although I guess not the most apt.
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u/Michael_Carson_Art 2d ago
The issue, as always, is that "consistent with" does not mean "evidence for".
If 'what we know' is a 'square', it would be consistent with the square to hypothesize that the square is made of two triangles, or ten rectangles, and so on... It would not be consistent to say that the square was made of circles.
This is useful, because we can eliminate a ton of bad arguments.
But it doesn't actually mean that any of these hypotheses are evidenced simply because they are consistent with what is known. There is no evidence that we are in a simulation, even if we never find evidence that we aren't.
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u/MaybeNo2485 2d ago
Sure, I wasn't presenting it as evidence in support of the idea per se; actually suggesting that conclusion over others would require finding falsifiable hypotheses to explore.
The point was to explain why some people support the idea, since it fits existing observations better than one might expect. Personally, I suspect the data is gesturing at a connection between gravity and entropy; specifically, that gravity may be emergent from entropic quantum effects rather than a true force. That direction has been increasingly explored over the last decade, with potentially promising results.
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u/Happy_Brilliant7827 3d ago
Eh theres a big misconception with science that it 'is' a certain way.
If you ask 5 high school science teachers how gravity works you'll get the usual 'a low point in 3d space caused by the distortion of mass into space time, sort of like a slope'
If you ask 5 high level theoretical physicists how gravity works, you're likely to get five different answers.
Scientists are individuals so 'a scientist has stated' is practically worthless compared to 'Scientists have verified the testable claim based on the theory.'
Scientists are extremely succeptable to the halo effect. This is why a lot of 'fringe scientists' who have gained fame are outside their trained field. There arent a lot of geographers and physists and archeologistswho believe in flat earth and ancient aliens- but there are a lot more geologists who believe in aliens, comsci specialists who are flat earthers, dentists that are 'technically a dr' selling herbal supplements, etc.
If a scientist says "i went to school 20 years and we are definately in a simulation" the very first thing that should be asked is 'is your education and training actually in this relavent field? Have they cooperated with other field experts to decide or decided 'I'm smart, how hard can it be this must be right'
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u/Outrageous_Map_687 3d ago
Convenience. It’s easier for plot and narrative control if everyone is - effectively - moving around on a 2 dimensional plane rather than being able to fly off in all directions.
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u/logos_flux 3d ago
I'm not sure what your are referring to but a few things come to mind: unified field theory, the gravotron, and the tuning problem.
We have two physical theories that both have an incredible ability to predict future states: general relativity and quantum mechanics. The problem is that they don't work together. The idea is that we should have a single physical universe and a single set of physical laws ought to be able to describe the actions within that universe. Gravity bends spacetime but particles only respect that occasionally.
All of the physical forces, other then gravity, can be understood via particle physics- electromagnetics and nuclear force do a great job of explaining why things are the way they are. If gravity were a force like all the other forces it would have a particle wave duality. We have a map that shows how all the other forces work, and there is a place where a gravity particle should be, but it's not there.
A black hole is a location where the gravity is so strong nothing can escape, except we due to non-locality of particles, information can escape. The universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. The only force we have to explain that is gravity and gravity would need mass but we can't find the mass or energy, so we call it dark matter, and it would have to be like over 90% of all mass to cause the expansion we are seeing.
On top of this, we have forty or so "constants" which are seemingly arbitrary numbers other then that we we use them in an equation they predict future physical states perfectly. So the force of gravity is seemingly arbitrary, but if it were any stronger or weaker nothing would exist, so why is it exactly the right value that we have a universe at all?
All of this can lead on to view gravity as a bit of a fudge factor- like the thing tacked onto the simulation to make it all work and hope the monkeys don't notice how absurd it is.
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u/rogerbonus 3d ago
Haven't heard anything about that recently. I've made the argument, and a couple of others perhaps, that the fact that our theories of gravity and quantum mechanics are so far incompatible (we don't have quantum gravity) is (Bayesian) evidence in support of simulation theory. We know from simulations/video games etc that using different, incompatible rules for different scales is a technique that works to reduce computational complexity. So perhaps the simulators use different rules for the very large (gravity) than they do for the very small (quantum mechanics). Perhaps others have been making the same observation?
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u/Conscious_Cut_6144 2d ago
Gravity confusing
Scientists think scientists smart
Scientists claim the universe cheats and is fake
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1d ago
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u/Paintverse 1d ago
I'm still in awe of Australians for always living upside down. Then they go to Europe or the States and don't get dizzy. lol
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u/Alternative-Text5897 3d ago
It’s the closest thing to empirical proof of a universal constant that justifies why planets conglomerate into massive balls of mass in the vacuum of a 0 gravity outer space, and almost always need satellite moons in orbit to help control tides to make them habitable by land dwelling species
To the average tin foil hat wearer—and apparently now credentialed astrophysicists—the fact that ball earth theory has more scientific merit than flat snowglobe earth theory, tracks more with the absurdity of this all being a simulation than something purely created (see ancient models of firmament earth theory) where outer space is just a holographic image and the sun is actually the same size and distance as the moon from earth
Counterintuitive, I know, since creationism and firmament/flat earth theory sound way more like a simulated reality than the former, scientifically and gravity based models of the universe
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u/RossPeili 2d ago
It's crazy how brainwashed salary driven career oriented scientists are. They spend decades avoiding God only to end up with God, that is, of they actually understand any science by the end of their life.
If you actually understand science, the deeper you dive and the more multidisciplinary you are (that is a real scientist and not a career NPC), the more unavoidable God becomes.
You can also see that by all great scientists of all times, from ancient Greeks, to alchemists, to Tesla, to SS, to Quantum fathers etc. They all, without an exception, point to God. Even those who were avoiding God at start, ended up with God.
There is a reason for that, as they were not atupid or delusional, but to understand that reason, you withwr have to have a firm grasp of math, physics, chemistry, gentry, quantum, dna, frequencies, and ao much more, or take LSD and skip the hard work, dorectly accessing universal knowledge by brute force, or trust the scientists you pretend you understand.
Most people be like "God doesn't exist cause of science", then you ask them to name any scientific theory and they left scratching their heads. If they understood anything about science and the people the trust and blindly have faith in (great scientists), then God is unavoidable.
Now, God is not a bearded guy behind the clouds who created this sim/venv in 7 prompts. Unless you take Bible literally. God refers to the initial creative forces that led to ehat we refer to as real life. It is hard to grasp in English, but eg. If you speak Greek, Georgian, Egyptian etc. God has a deeper meaning from etymology. Eg. In Greek, Θεός, comes from Θείτημι, which means something like he who sets things in motion. In English, like most words, God simply means God. There is no etymology.
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u/Low-Bake8401 3d ago
If you don't believe in god, there is no evidence of god.
If you do believe in god, then everything becomes evidence of god.