British physicist Melvin Vopson has proposed a way to find out if we are living in a computer simulation

 By now, most people have heard of "simulation theory" that we live in an advanced virtual world - but one theoretical physicist now says he not only has a way to test the concept, but is raising community funds to make it a reality. Dr Melvin Vopson, a British scientist at the University of Portsmouth, has come up with a new method of checking whether our universe is a computer simulation. Its approach is based on the achievements of information physics.

Vopson notes that he was prompted to create a new method by the theory of the American physicist Landauer, who in 1961 formulated the principle that digital information should be considered a special form of physical matter. One of the main theoretical consequences of Landauer's principle is the rejection of the understanding of space-time and matter as the fundamental foundations of the world. In their place is a bit of information from which, as researchers of this theory, our perception of other physical phenomena is derived.

In an essay for The Conversation, Melvin Vopson laid out the theory of his simulation test, which is based on the assumption that "a simulated universe would contain many bits of information everywhere" and that these bits "represent a code". "Therefore," Vopson wrote, "the detection of these bits of information will confirm the simulation hypothesis."

Based on his recently proposed "mass-energy-information (M/E/I) equivalence principle", which suggests that "mass can be expressed as energy or information or vice versa", the physicist believes that bits of information would have little mass. He adds that if the mass of these bits could be found, theoretically the bits themselves could be detected.

Consistent with the M/E/I theory, Vopson suggested that information could be considered the fifth form of matter in the universe after solids, liquids, gases, and plasma. The resulting experiment makes a beautiful, if somewhat complicated, sense. The experiment is designed to erase the information contained in elementary particles by allowing them and their antiparticles (all particles have "anti" versions of themselves that are identical but have the opposite charge) to annihilate in a burst of energy by emitting photons, or particles of light.

Vopson wants to show that information bits exist by inserting the particles that contain them into their opposites, causing them to explode and emitting releasing photons. To do so, as Vopson wrote on his website, the physicist wants to "build a workshop positron-electron annihilation system" containing "custom components that will allow the simultaneous detection of gamma and [infrared] photons."

So far, the campaign has only raised about $1,000 from the approximately $219,000 goal. Nevertheless, it is exciting that someone is finally going to test the "simulation" theory - though it is not known what will come of it.