A simulation is a representation of something else, just as a model of the Empire State building represents it, and an information simulation is a representation based on information. For example, simulating the weather with a computer lets us predict it, and flight simulators let pilots experience a plane without actually flying it. A simulation then represents what is real, but isn’t itself it.

The simulation hypothesis is that our world is a simulation created by computers in another physical reality, as portrayed in the film The Matrix, where Morpheus says:

“What is real? How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

The hero Neo then discovers that his reality is actually a simulation of New York in 1999, fed into his brain as electrical signals by future machines in the real world, who are using humans as energy sources. Physical machines are then simulating physical events, but is that possible?

The classical processing needed to simulate a system increases exponentially with the number of particles in it because they interact, so classical computers can only calculate the behavior of a few entities (Eck, 2017), and to simulate even a couple hundred electrons would take more atoms than exist in the universe (Kendra, 2017), let alone simulating New York city or the universe. Other research finds that these calculations aren’t just implausible but logically impossible (Faizal et al., 2025), so physicists conclude that we can’t be living in a computer simulation.

Undeterred, simulation theory supporters suggest that our simulation has holes in it, so that doesn’t matter. For example, why simulate the 14 billion years of history before humans arrived, or galaxies and stars we can’t travel to, or quantum events we can’t observe? Instead of simulating a far-off galaxy, just show a dot of light so it appears real, just as movie do. Simulation theory then proposes that our world has flaws in it because it is fake.

The big computer of simulation theory (Campbell, 2003) can’t calculate quantum events, so it expects to find flaws in quantum theory (Campbell, Owhadi, Sauvageau, & Watkinson, 2017), but quantum theory critics have been trying to falsify it for over a century, so it is unlikely to succeed. And even if it did, finding a fault in quantum theory would just result in its revision, as scientific theories succeed by predicting their own results not by falsifying others.

If simulation theory is impossible then machines, aliens, or our future-selves can’t be creating our physical world from another, but this isn’t the only version of virtualism. Annex 1 summarizes how a physical world could be a virtual reality generated by something else, and concludes that what generates physical events can’t have a physical base. This excludes not only physical virtualism (the Matrix option), but also information virtualism that is based on hardware, and even the mind virtualism suggested by Kastrup (Kastrup, 2019).

The remaining option is quantum virtualism, that quantum events generate physical events, as proposed here. A simulation must simulate something, but what creates our world isn’t like it at all, and that is why it works. Unlike classical processing, quantum processing increases exponentially as it grows, so as space expands it scales to match the demand. This allows a quantum network the size of our universe to generate it.

Processing costs aren’t now an issue because the network is always active anyway, so every moment of the past fourteen billion years happened, every far-away galaxy seen in our telescopes exists, and quantum events actually happen. Hence however hard we look, in the past, far away, or microscopically, there are no cracks or rifts in the world we see.  

Our universe is on a scale we can barely imagine, so we don’t really know what it is doing, any more than the billions of animals that lived and died in biological history knew that they were taking part in an evolution. Our universe is then not just a virtual reality but one that is evolving, so what is evolution?

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The question of why something exists rather than nothing is a fundamental question of metaphysics because it doesn’t assume anything about matter, God, or the laws of physics. Russell’s answer, in a radio debate in 1948, was that the existence of our universe is just a brute fact:

“I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.” (see Copleston vs. Russell).

He argued that our universe just is and that’s it, so scientists at the time assumed it always was, until evidence revealed that it actually began about fourteen billion years ago in the big bang, which re-raised the question of why it came into existence. 

Science now concludes that at a past point in time, an enormous amount of energy was injected into a small space that then expanded into our universe, and space and time probably began then as well. It was as if a switch clicked and something began, leading to the simulation hypothesis made popular by the Matrix movie.

QR5.7.1. The Simulation Hypothesis

QR5.7.2. What Is Evolution?

QR5.7.3. Why Virtual?

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Armageddon, the end of days, depends in physics on how space is curved overall. Relativity lets space curve but doesn’t specify how it is curved. In mathematics, a positively curved space will eventually stop expanding and contract in a big crunch, but a negatively curved space will expand faster and faster forever because there isn’t enough mass to stop it leading to a big freeze. The latter was expected until cosmology discovered that the expansion of space is accelerating not slowing down (Cowen, 2013), so space is negatively curved.

If our space is the inner surface of an expanding hyper-bubble (2.4.1), it will have the slight negative curvature that cosmology predicts, but that doesn’t mean it will expand forever. If our universe is an expanding bubble in a quantum bulk, there are probably others, so they will eventually meet. What happens when one pocket universe, as Guth calls them, meets another?

The answer depends on whether they are made of matter or antimatter. If one matter universe meets another, they will just merge into a bigger bubble, so if our universe has already done this, it will be bigger than its own expansion allows. The alternative, that our universe meets an antimatter universe, is the Armageddon option.

What then happens when matter meets antimatter? Essentially, they destroy each other, so if a matter universe collided with an anti-matter universe, both would be destroyed to some degree. Antimatter is rare in our universe but is produced tiny amounts by cosmic rays in thunderstorms. It soon vanishes however when it meets matter, some of which probably also vanishes with it. It seems then that if our bubble universe met its antimatter equal, both could annihilate back into the quantum bulk from whence they came.

This Armageddon would spread at light speed but it could take a while, as our galaxy is an estimated 100,000 light years across, and the observable universe is 90 billion light years across. Even so, could our telescopes see it coming? Unfortunately no, as we see galaxies as they were millions of years ago. Our earth would just be there one moment and gone the next. When our world is packed away, it will be at the speed of light, with no possible warning.

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Disorder increases because quantum events explore every physical option, but that also finds combinations that don’t change, which is order. For example, when an electron and a proton form a hydrogen, they move together so order increases. Electrons in atoms move in two dimensions not three, so fewer degrees of freedom is also more order. Atoms then illustrate how order evolves.

The evolution of atoms by nucleosynthesis in stars creates an order that exists as long as those atoms, not just temporarily. For example, a lead atom has 82 protons, 125 neutrons, and 82 electrons in a high order state that has a half-life of millions of years, which is permanent in our terms. 

A cool fridge on a hot day needs a power supply to stay cold but lead atoms don’t need energy to maintain their order, but they do need an unlikely sequence of events, just as an egg does. Matter then evolves by finding combinations that persist, however unlikely, not by maintaining a heat instability. For example, if the first matter arose when extreme light collided head-on (4.3.1), this was by any standards a very unlikely event, but the result was electrons that persist. When light that was free became bound in an electron, order increased, but no energy is needed to maintain it. The evolution of matter increases order in a way that doesn’t need any more energy input. 

This evolution doesn’t contradict the second law statement that order requires energy because the search for stable combinations needs energy. Atoms then lawfully formed ordered molecules, as hydrogen and oxygen gases make water, until eventually super-molecules like RNA that copy themselves led to simple cells, so the evolution of life was based on the evolution of matter.

In general, the same quantum law causes both evolution and devolution, so they complement rather than contradict, although they seem different. Evolution increases order by finding stable unlikely states, and devolution increases disorder by finding stable probable states. Evolution creates the possible and devolution creates the probable, but both have the same underlying cause.

If evolution is limited to biology, the second law reigns supreme, but it isn’t. Matter also evolves so evolution is also universal, based on the same quantum law. An unstoppable reality is constantly shaking our universe to possibly evolve, even as it probably decays. The second law of thermo-dynamics describes devolution, but evolution is the other side of the same quantum coin, so it can be seen as a necessary byproduct of evolution, just as neutrinos are byproducts of electrons.

The evolution of matter is an anti-entropy process that by the second law shouldn’t occur, but it does. Evolution was built into our universe from its quantum inception, so the grand evolution of matter and life going on all around us defines the universe as much as physics based on heat flows. That the universe is devolving doesn’t mean it isn’t also evolving beings like us. Evolution then explains what the second law can’t, that life exists because order evolved.

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The opposite of entropy is order, an unlikely state like an unbroken egg, but if order inevitably declines, why is it all around us? Day follows night, seasons cycle, and plants produce not only food but also the air we breathe, in a synergistic, self-regulating system that some call Gaiea. 

Is the web of life on earth then just a local anomaly that bucks the universal trend to disorder? For example, a fridge that keeps beer cold on a hot day doesn’t deny the second law because it gets energy from electrical power, and our earth has the sun to power it. But our earth isn’t the only planet that orbits a star, they all do, so it may be lucky but it isn’t unusual. And its order requires order above it. For life to evolve on earth, the sun had to keep its planets in order, and the galaxy had to keep its stars in order, so if earth’s order comes from a cosmic order, it isn’t a local anomaly.

Hence, the only explanation that current physics allows is that the big bang was highly ordered, so life is still possible because our universe is still only half-way through its devolution:

“The ultimate source of order, of low entropy, must be the big bang itself. … The egg splatters rather than unsplatters because it is … the drive toward higher entropy … initiated by the extraordinarily low entropy state with which the universe began.” (Greene, 2004), p173-174.

In this reverse logic, our universe began very ordered because the second law is true, but that the initial chaos was highly ordered makes no sense at all. How is the white hot plasma that came before atoms and molecules formed, let alone stars, very ordered? If there was a prize for backward thinking (Note 1), this would surely be a top contender.

How then did life on earth begin? Our earth was born about four and a half billion years ago but for over half that time, only single cell organisms existed. As continents formed and volcanoes erupted, they produced the oxygen needed by plants and animals later. Primitive archaea and bacteria merged into the modern cells that led to plants, animals, and us (Lane, 2015), but in the earth’s timeline, the latter only began to proliferate about half a billion years ago. Nature’s order has been a long time coming, so to call it a devolution based on a heat engine law is ridiculous.

Modern humans arose about three million years ago, so bacteria that have been on our planet for billions of years are still poorly understood. For example, bacteria in boxes placed outside the International Space Station for a year were seen to come back to life when they returned to earth. Under harsh conditions, bacteria can form spores that are dead metabolically but revive under the right conditions, even after millions of years, so they could hitch a ride on a meteor to travel between planets. The panspermia hypothesis, that life can evolve on one planet and spread to another, means that bacteria from mars might have colonized the earth.

Whether this is true or not, bacteria exist on earth, so of the mind-boggling 160 billion planets thought to exist in our galaxy, many others may host them too. If so, a galaxy teeming with life isn’t what the second law predicts after 14 billion years of decay!

Clearly, order is possible, but if the second law predicts only disorder, what caused it?

Note 1 Backward thinking explains an already known answer, by tweaking it to fit the facts, or the facts to fit it, so it doesn’t produce new knowledge. In contrast, forward thinking begins with a question and lets the evidence lead to an answer, so it can produce new knowledge. Science is based on forward thinking not backward thinking (see Research Roadmap).

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The second law of thermodynamics explains what the first law can’t, why events that are in theory reversible, in practice might not be. For example, running a video of the earth orbiting the sun looks the same to us, but playing a video of an egg breaking in reverse evokes laughter. By the first law, the events of egg breaking are just as reversible as the earth’s orbit, but common sense tells us it doesn’t happen. The second law states that the disorder of every isolated  system increases or stays constant, so eggs can break but not unbreak.

Entropy is the concept physics uses to describe disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. Boltzmann defined it as the number of possible microscopic states, of atoms or molecules, that produce a macroscopic state, and that definition is used here. For example, when a colored gas injected into an empty bottle spreads, entropy is said to increase. Initially, when the gas molecules are concentrated, entropy is low because the number of molecule combinations that allow it is low. Of all the molecule combinations, far more support the spread-out state, so it has a higher entropy. The gas then spreads to increase entropy because more micro-state combinations support it.

In general, entropy increases as disorder increases (Figure 5.18). Yet while the gas in the bottle will probably spread over time, its molecules could all by chance move back to the top, but that is unlikely. The second law is based probability, so it’s a statistical law, not a causal law. It isn’t that objects must become more disordered, but that in a constantly changing world, they probably will. Disorder therefore prevails because it is more probable.

The second law is then universal because our world is like a bottle being constantly shaken, so its contents tend to disperse. As Heraclitus observed thousands of years ago, our world is a constant flux that always changes from one moment to the next. The quantum principle behind the Heraclitean flux is the quantum law of all action (3.6.3), that quantum reality always tries every option, so this law underlies the second law of thermodynamics.

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We say that energy isn’t created or destroyed when we see it take other forms. For example, when a car slows down due to road friction, its tires become hot and radiate heat, so kinetic energy is being converted into heat energy. Conversely, a steam engine essentially converts heat energy into kinetic energy. Energy then is seen to take different forms, but with one notable exception.

Lifting an object takes energy that dropping it releases, but where does it go to or come from? There is no heat or radiation, so it is said to have potential energy based on its position in a gravitational field. This balances the energy books, to conserve energy, but where is potential energy stored?

For example, if a rocket blasts off into an earth orbit, where did the liftoff energy go? If it then floats off into space, where is that energy stored when it leaves our solar system? Or if it crashes into a big planet like Jupiter, to release more energy than it took to leave earth, where did the extra energy come from? The current answer, that gravity gives and takes potential energy, is a theory about an unknown mechanism that lets energy be conserved when apparently, it isn’t.

In this model, energy is the transfer of processing that occurs when quantum waves spread. Light then has radiant energy because it spreads, and high frequencies that spread more processing have more energy. Heat energy is also radiant energy, but of a lower frequency. Radiant energy is then conserved because photons are never destroyed, but just restart, as processing can. If every physical event restarts photons in various forms, as light or matter, photons are always conserved. 

When light shining on a solar sail makes it move, radiant energy is converted into kinetic energy. If the sail moves because it acquires photons that bias its distribution, kinetic energy is also based on photons. When objects collide in empty space, kinetic energy is conserved because directional photons are exchanged, but their number is constant. Nuclear energy from matter seems different, but if matter arose from light, it is also based on photons.

What then is potential energy? Potential energy is based on gravity, which as Einstein deduced isn’t a force at all, so no energy is involved.  When a rocket leaves earth, no photons are lost, and if it crashes on Jupiter, no photons are created, so the conservation of photons avoids the fudge of potential energy.

Current physics conserves matter, charge, momentum, isospin, quark flavor and color, but each law is partial, as matter isn’t conserved in nuclear reactions, and quark flavor isn’t conserved in weak interactions. Energy is then the same, a partial law, because it can’t explain potential energy or the loss of energy due to the expansion of space.  

Yet if photons are universally conserved not energy, how does the expansion of space affect this law? The answer is not at all. If our universe began with the creation of light, in what physics calls inflation, which was healed by the expansion of space, the number of photons that exist has stayed constant since then, at a finite number. Expanding space changed the energy of the universe but not the total number of photons in it.

Our universe then conserves only photons, not matter, energy, or anything else, because it arose entirely from light, and nothing but light. What then does the second law mean?

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The concept of order arose from thermodynamics, which began as the study of heat in machines like steam engines, to increase their efficiency. It was observed that the total energy was constant, which was the first law of thermodynamics, and that energy always flows from hot to cold, which was the second law. It follows that if our universe is a closed system, it will have a constant energy that constantly disperses.

The second law of thermodynamics then predicts that everything in our universe will disperse, until there is maybe one atom per cubic light year, in a big freeze that will last forever, so:

“… eventually all these over densities will be ironed out and the Universe will be left featureless and lifeless forever, it seems” (Barrow, 2007), p191.

The problem with this prediction is that by the big bang, our universe wasn’t always big. It is now thought that it was once about the size of a tennis ball, then expanded into what it is today. But by thermodynamics, expanding a system requires energy, and blowing up a balloon cools the gas inside it. It follows that our universe isn’t a closed system because it needs energy to expand.

The cooling effect of this expanding is shown by cosmic microwave background, which was once white hot but is now freezing cold. If space is expanding everywhere, every photon now has a slightly longer wavelength than a moment ago, and so less energy than before. Expanding space took its energy and didn’t give it back, so the total energy of the universe must reduce, because expanding takes energy.

Does this then deny the thermodynamic principle of conservation of energy? Not necessarily because if our universe isn’t a closed system, it doesn’t apply. But it does suggest a closer examination of that principle, so on what facts is the principle of conservation of energy based? 

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The second law of thermodynamics is that every closed physical system tends to increase its entropy, the technical term for disorder. If our universe is a closed system, then disorder should constantly increase but according to Strogatz, this doesn’t explain what we see today:

“Scientists have often been baffled by the existence of spontaneous order in the universe. The laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder, greater entropy. Yet all around us we see magnificent structures—galaxies, cells, ecosystems, human beings—that have all somehow managed to assemble themselves.” (Strogatz, 2003).

If our universe is constantly increasing disorder, how did fourteen billion years of degeneration produce the order around us today? That is like waking up in a warm bed with an electric blanket and being told that humans have been in constant decline since they lived in caves. It doesn’t make sense, so either the second law is wrong or some other universal law is opposing it.

QR5.6.1. The Conservation of Energy

QR5.6.2. The Universal Conservation

QR5.6.3. Disorder is Probable

QR5.6.4. Order is Possible

QR5.6.5. Order Evolves

QR5.6.6. Armageddon

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The unification of the fields of gravity, electricity, and magnetism has long been a dream of physics. The electro-magnetic field united the latter but gravity resisted, and the new fields of the standard model made it seem unlikely that one field could create dozens of particles.

But if the strong, weak, and Higgs fields are unnecessary inventions (4.5.3), the fields to be unified reduce to three again, which the last module attributed to one cause. This cause could be called the gravito-electro-magnetic field, but the quantum field is simpler.

What is the quantum field? In simple terms, it is the quantum wave values that quantum theory uses to explain photons and electrons. Schrödinger’s equation describes how these waves spread but not why they collapse and restart at a point when a physical event occurs. This model explains that they are processing waves that restart when they overload the network they spread on. The same process that explains the quantum waves of light then also explain matter (4.5.8), as quantum waves constantly restarting in a standing wave. This allows matter to have three distinct aspects:

1. Mass. The net processing result from +1 to -1 in one or more dimensions.

2. Charge. The net processing remainder from +1 to -1 in one or more dimensions.

3. Spin. The processing spin direction, which can be up or down.

One field, the quantum field, then produces space, light, and matter according to the values it takes. When the quantum field takes null values, we see empty space, but if it takes the values mass +1 and charge -1, we see an electron. Quantum waves always spread, so matter creates a distribution, like ripples spreading in a bucket (Figure 5.15), that alters the quantum field around it because quantum waves superpose. 

In Figure 5.16, gravity, charge, and magnetism move objects by biasing the quantum field around them. On the left is matter, whose mass, charge, and magnetism affect the distribution it spreads into the quantum field around it. 

On the right, is the quantum field that mediates the effects of mass, charge, and magnetism. A large mass creates a gravity field that increases the strength of the quantum field closer to it. Charges create electrical fields that speed up or slow down the quantum field between them, when they cancel or add. Magnets create magnetic fields that also speed up or slow down the quantum field between them, when spins make space deeper or shallower. 

The effect in all cases is that matter moves because biasing the strength or speed of the quantum field around it makes it restart more often one way, as even a small bias will give movement in our time. 

The fields of physics then move matter by biasing its natural tremble, not by invoking particles from nowhere to push it. When the quantum field around a matter entity becomes stronger or faster in one direction, it restarts more often that way, so it moves in our terms. Gravitational fields bias the field strength around matter, electrical fields bias the field speed between charges, and magnetic fields do the same between magnets. All these fields are based on only one field, the quantum field.

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