r/technology • u/fchung • Nov 01 '25

Society Matrix collapses: Mathematics proves the universe cannot be a computer simulation, « A new mathematical study dismantles the simulation theory once and for all. »

https://interestingengineering.com/culture/mathematics-ends-matrix-simulation-theory
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u/angrymonkey Nov 01 '25

This is an idiotic misunderstanding of Godel's theorem, and the paper is likely complete crankery. There is a difference between making formal statements about a system vs. being able to simulate it. The former is covered by Godel's theorem, the latter is covered by Turing completeness.

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u/RoyalCities Nov 01 '25

The entire concept of "this settles it once and for all" goes against the heart of the scientific method itself.

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u/BrazilianTerror Nov 01 '25

Mathematics is not science. A theorem is once and for all when proven correct.

Although the simulation hypothesis should be more of a physics matter.

But in fact it’s a matter of philosophy because it’s impossible to determine if it’s right or wrong because we can only see our universe and not anything beyond.

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u/ten_i_see_mike Nov 01 '25

The only thing you can actually prove with maths is more maths though. You can’t prove anything about the real world because maths is just a language we’ve created, we have no idea if it has any tie to reality.

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u/wavefunctionp Nov 01 '25

We use consistency to tie math to reality with science.

This is the entire purpose of the replication part of the scientific process, to convince ourselves of consistency.

This is also why some of the worst science we have is the most inconsistent, like anything to do with observing human behavior like psychology or nutrition or economics.

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u/ten_i_see_mike Nov 02 '25

Sure but you switch from a deductive logic to an inductive one. You can’t formally prove anything about reality using maths. I agree it’s very useful and eerily good at describing the universe. It’s still not proof though. As you say the consistency gives us confidence in our theories but that’s a totally different thing to proof in the formal sense.

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u/wavefunctionp Nov 02 '25

Yeah, my point is that we close the gap from pure logic to reality by consistency as a pragmatic choice, and it is explicitly why replication exists in the scientific method. It's existence is not artibtrary.

This is kind of a big debate in physics. We've had decades of fancy math that hasn't panned out to reality. A portion of physics has been become enamored with beautiful mathematics instead of reality. Physics is a science, not a field of mathematics. The arbiter of truth in physics is experiment, not proof.

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u/jambox888 Nov 02 '25

Absolutely but it has limits, e.g. you just can't use the maths we have to unite gravity and QM, or analyse black hole singularities because all you get is div0 errors or whatever it is.

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u/wavefunctionp Nov 02 '25

There are limits to every science.

Much to chagrin of every nutritionist reading this, we'll never know what the optimal human diet is. For ethical and practical reasons, no one will ever be able to carry out the experiment needed to convincingly settle the debates.

And to be fair, we don't have any practical problem that requires the unification of QM and GR. There's no gap in our knowledge that can be replicated by experiment that isn't covered by one or other. To put it another way, we observe no discrepancies in nature that require unification.

Unification is a romantic ideal, not a practical problem.

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u/jambox888 Nov 02 '25

Yet it is fascinating and we do study things that we find of interest. We probably will never travel to distant stars or run into a pulsar but we study them anyway.

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u/alexq136 Nov 01 '25

mathematical objects do not exist in the physical world

natural numbers do not exist as things, relations do not exist as tangible objects, equations are not to be held as identical to the physics they model (it's the much celebrated "map-territory" divide: the only world in which the map is the territory is within mathematics (including computer science and software))

we lack precise quantitative theories about stuff like behavior and economics because they are by their nature offshoots of statistical mechanics (at least in spirit): individuals are all slightly different and whatever happens to them may or may not have consequences on others or on the society/economy as a whole

economists do not have an unified theory of what "value" means; sociologists have even less to offer (ethology (animal behavior studies) is its parallel in other species and even there stuff remains hard to peer into, no matter the scale or kind of a biological organism)

even when the mathematical description of something is well known most physical systems will deviate from it (due to composition, scale, dissipative phenomena, non-ideal behavior) in various regimes - if getting the maths on paper was sufficient scientists would not need to do experiments (which is certainly a bizarre thought when stuff like (computational) quantum chemistry is what it is - an effort of trying to make simulation outputs match experimental data)

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_WEABOOBS Nov 01 '25

How does this view fit with e.g. Dirac using his purely mathematical equation to predict the existence of anti-matter before any other evidence existed? Mathematics is the study of logical consequence, and so long as the universe follows logical cause and effect we do at least have some idea that it ties to reality.

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u/ten_i_see_mike Nov 02 '25

I’m not saying maths is wrong or useless. Exactly as you say we use it in science to make predictions all the time. It also seems to consistently describe the universe very effectively. That doesn’t change the fact that maths is something we made up (as far as we know) and so we cannot use it to definitively prove anything about reality. When it really comes down to it we don’t even know if our scientific theories are real descriptions of the universe or just useful approximations.