Physicist Studying SARS-CoV-2 Virus Believes He Has Found Hints We Are Living In A Simulation

A physicist studying mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus says he has found evidence of a new law of physics called the “second law of infodynamics,” and that it could indicate we live in a simulated universe. On top of that, he suggests that the study seems to imply that the theory of evolution is incorrect, with mutations not being entirely random.

There’s a lot to unpack here. The first thing to say is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far – as Dr. Melvin Vopson explains in his work – we don’t have any of it at all. In fact, we’re not even close. However, the ideas and results presented are intriguing and interesting, even if further study or examination proves them to be incorrect.

In his latest study, Vopson examined mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 virus from the perspective of information entropy (a term distinct from usual entropy).

“The physical entropy of a given system is a measure of all its possible physical microstates consistent with the macrostate,” Vopson explained in the paper. “This is a characteristic of non-information-carrying microstates within the system. Assuming the same system, and assuming that one is able to create N information states within the same physical system (for example, by writing digital bits to it), the The effect of creating a certain number of N information states is to form N additional information micro-states superimposed on the existing physical micro-states. These additional micro-states. are information-carrying states, and the additional entropy associated with them is called information entropy.

While entropy tends to increase over time, information entropy tends to decrease, according to Vopson. An illustration of this would be the thermal death of the universe, where the universe reaches a state of thermal equilibrium. At this point, entropy has reached its maximum value, but informational entropy has not. At this heat death (or just before), the range of possible temperatures and states in any region of the universe is very small, meaning that fewer events are possible and less information can be superimposed, which reduces the entropy of the information.

Although interesting as a way of describing the universe, can it teach us anything new, or are we simply seeing a secondary but unimportant way of describing entropy? According to Vopson, the idea is a physical law that could govern everything from genetics to the evolution of the universe.

“My study indicates that the second law of infodynamics appears to be a cosmological necessity. It is universally applicable with immense scientific ramifications,” Vopson wrote in The Conversation. “We know that the universe is expanding without heat loss or gain, which requires the total entropy of the universe to be constant. However, we also know from thermodynamics that entropy is always increasing. I argue that this shows that there must be another entropy – information entropy – to balance the increase.

Vopson examined the SARS-CoV-2 virus as it mutated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus has been regularly sequenced to monitor its evolution, largely in order to develop new vaccines. By looking at RNA, not DNA, he found that the entropy of information decreased over time.

“The best example of something that undergoes a number of mutations in a short period of time is a virus. The pandemic gave us the ideal testing sample because SARS-CoV-2 has mutated into so many variants and the available data is incredible,” Vopson explained in a press release.

“COVID data confirms the second law of infodynamics and the research opens limitless possibilities. Imagine looking at a particular genome and judging whether a mutation is beneficial before it happens. This is a revolutionary technology that could be used in genetic therapies, the pharmaceutical industry, evolutionary biology and pandemic research.

For Vopson, this suggests that mutations are not random, but governed by a law that states that the entropy of information must remain the same or decrease over time. It would be an astonishing discovery if confirmed, upending the way we think evolution works, but Vopson points to a similar experiment in 1972 that saw an unexpected reduction in the genome of a virus over 74 generations under ideal conditions, which he says is consistent with his second law of infodynamics.

“The global consensus is that mutations occur randomly and that natural selection then dictates whether the mutation is good or bad for an organism,” he explained. “But what if there is a hidden process causing these mutations? Whenever we see something we don’t understand, we describe it as “random,” “chaotic,” or “paranormal,” but that’s only our inability to explain it. “

“If we can start looking at genetic mutations from a deterministic perspective, we can exploit this new law of physics to predict mutations – or the likelihood of mutations – before they occur. »

Vopson thinks the law could also explain why symmetry appears so abundantly in the universe.

“High symmetry corresponds to a state of low information entropy, which is exactly what the second law of infodynamics requires,” Vopson wrote in his paper. “Therefore, this remarkable observation seems to explain why symmetry dominates in the universe: this is due to the second law of information dynamics.”

The bold claims (with the demand for further evidence) don’t stop there.

“Since the second law of infodynamics is a cosmological necessity and seems to apply equally everywhere, one might conclude that this indicates that the entire universe appears to be a simulated construct or giant computer,” adds Vopson in The Conversation. .

“A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require built-in data optimization and compression to reduce the computing power and data storage requirements to run the simulation. is exactly what we observe everywhere, including in digital data, biological systems, mathematical symmetries and the entire universe.

This does not mean that confirming the “second law of infodynamics” would prove that we live in a simulation – it is possible for the theory to be correct without it being the case. There are other effects of quantum mechanics that seem to prove that this is not the case.

So how can we test all of this further? If infodynamics is correct, information must have mass allowing it to interact with everything else. There is some evidence to suggest that this might be the case, for example that irreversible erasure of information appears to dissipate heat, according to a 2012 study. For Vopson, this indicates that this energy must be stored as mass before erasure , which makes the information a separate element. state of matter equivalent to mass and energy.

Proving or disproving that information has mass may not be too difficult to do experimentally. A simple experiment would be to measure the mass of a hard drive before and after the information is irreversibly erased. Unfortunately, this is currently beyond our capabilities given how few massive changes are expected.

But according to Vopson, if this theory is true, elementary particles would probably carry information about themselves. For example, letting an electron (or perhaps the only electron in the universe) know its properties, such as its charge and spin. One proposed experiment involves sending particles and antiparticles at each other at high speed.

“The experiment consists of erasing the information contained inside the elementary particles leaving them and their antiparticles (all particles have ‘anti’ versions of themselves which are identical but have opposite charges) annihilate in a flash of energy – emitting ‘photons’, or light particles,” Vopson added. “I predicted the exact range of expected frequencies of the resulting photons based on information physics.”

Although the idea is unusual, the experiment is relatively inexpensive at $180,000 (absolutely nothing for proponents of simulation theory like Elon Musk) and testable with current technology. Of course, this could just tell us that the idea is incorrect, but it seems like an interesting idea to examine and rule out, or to find out if it has weight (or, more precisely, mass).