A University of Portsmouth physicist is crowdfunding to test whether we live in a computer simulation.
Dr Melvin Vopson has designed an experiment to determine whether Elon Musk and others are right to hypothesize that we are simply characters in an advanced virtual world.
Dr Vopson, from the University's School of Mathematics and Physics, said: "There is a growing community out there looking seriously at the possibility that information is more fundamental to everything than we think.
"If information is a key component of everything in the universe, it would make sense that a vast computer somewhere is in control.
"Assuming the universe is indeed a simulation, then it must contain a lot of information bits hidden everywhere around us. I've devised an experiment that proposes a way of extracting this information to prove it's there."
Dr Melvin Vopson explains his research
Dr Vopson's experiment is based on his previous research findings that information is physical and has mass, and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves.
His experiment proposes how to detect and measure the information in an elementary particle by using particle-antiparticle collision.
He said: "We can measure the information content of a particle by erasing it. If we delete the information from the particles, we can then look at what's left.
"This experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and I'm hoping the crowdfunding site will help us achieve it."
Please visit Dr Vopson's crowdfunding page to find out more: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/is-the-universe-a-simulation-let-s-test-it--2#/
