A team of researchers at the University of British Columbia has dealt a serious blow to one of the most popular sci-fi-sounding theories of our time: that reality is just a computer simulation. In a new paper, physicist Mir Faizal and his colleagues claim to have mathematically ruled out the idea, showing that the universe simply doesn’t work in a way that could be computed by any algorithm, no matter how powerful.
The argument, published in a study here, starts with the long-standing puzzle in physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics don’t play nicely together. Einstein’s smooth picture of spacetime clashes with the strange, probabilistic world of quantum theory. Physicists have spent decades trying to find a single “Theory of Everything” that unites both, but every time they think they’re close, the math falls apart.
Some of the most famous attempts, like string theory and loop quantum gravity, propose that spacetime and matter emerge from pure information, the idea that everything in the universe can be described as bits of data. This concept, coined by physicist John Wheeler as “it from bit,” has long inspired the notion that the universe could be a cosmic simulation, like a supercomputer calculating reality moment by moment.
Faizal’s team took that premise seriously and then showed why it fails. They used mathematical results from Kurt Gödel, Alfred Tarski, and Gregory Chaitin to argue that no computational system can ever describe every aspect of physical reality. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem shows that even the most consistent mathematical systems contain truths that can’t be proven within their own logic. Tarski proved that a system can’t define its own truth, and Chaitin found that there’s a limit to how much complexity any formal system can handle.
When these theorems are applied to physics, the conclusion is unavoidable: the laws of the universe can’t be fully algorithmic. “We have demonstrated that it is impossible to describe all aspects of physical reality using a computational theory of quantum gravity,” Faizal explained. “It requires non-algorithmic understanding, which is beyond computation and therefore cannot be simulated.”
The team proposes what they call a “Meta Theory of Everything,” or MToE, a framework that exists outside the limits of mathematical computation. Unlike the digital-style universe imagined in simulation theory, this one isn’t built from code; it’s fundamentally non-computable.
In other words, if the universe were a simulation, it would have to follow programmed rules. But the math says reality doesn’t, and no amount of processing power could make it. So, if this research holds up, it looks like the Matrix isn’t real after all.