The notion that we live as characters in someone else’s video game is irresistible to many, even outside of science fiction bookshelves. Googling the term “simulation hypothesis” returns numerous ...

The simulation hypothesis—the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer ...

Physicists have spent decades arguing over whether our universe is a fundamental reality or a kind of cosmic software, and ...

Let's say we build some ridiculous planet-sized computer — one so powerful it could simulate our entire universe. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here ...

Monisha Ravisetti was a science writer at CNET. She covered climate change, space rockets, mathematical puzzles, dinosaur bones, black holes, supernovas, and sometimes, the drama of philosophical ...

Is this real life? Is this just fantasy? A growing number of scientists are suggesting that the idea that we are all living in a simulation may not be completely far-fetched. Simulation theory is the ...

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow ...

“A sun of our own and it’s made in Britain!” crowed the headline. The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) believed its 120-ton experimental reactor Zeta was almost certainly generating neutrons from ...

From the maw of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, two enormous jets stream thousands of light-years into space. Scientists still don’t fully understand the physics behind ...

A military planner at the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, watches a battle unfold without taking his eyes off the computer screen. The software is tracking a million vehicles spread over ...

In 1952, at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, theoretical physicists Enrico Fermi, John Pasta and Stanislaw Ulam brainstormed ways to use the MANIAC, one of the world’s first supercomputers, to solve ...