We can’t ever know whether or not our universe is a simulation

Millennium Images, UK/Brighitta Moser-Clark

Are we living in a simulation? A flurry of headlines says no: we need no longer worry about our lives being mere software spawned by a highly advanced supercomputer.

These stories stem from a recent Science Advances paper about simulating quantum physics. One science magazine extrapolated from this to suggest that storing information about just a few hundred electrons needs a computer memory made up of more atoms than exist in the universe – thus, simulating the universe is impossible.

But the paper only claims that a specific, limited type of simulation won’t work due to technical