Scientists test to see if we’re part of the Matrix

Is this the real life?

Tarryn van der BylOctober 16, 2012

In news that will come as a potentially crushing disappointment to those people who watched The Matrix and decided that reality must be a computer simulation because the Wachowski brothers made a bad movie about it, nuclear physicists at the University of Bonn in Germany have devised a test to prove whether or not reality is anything more than just boring old reality.

Remember, scientists know more about this stuff than two college dropouts who once attended an introductory Philosophy 101 lecture and had a profound (read: not profound) epiphany about the human condition.

The actual science stuff is complicated, but basically, a computer simulation is limited by predefined values, while the physical world is not. The test checks whether reality as we know it is constrained by the same processes of discretization.

The study’s conclusion is necessarily somewhat non-committal given that current science simply can’t support all the required…science, but finds that [SPOILERS] reality is probably not a computer simulation. At least for now.