A scientist answers questions about the maximum speed of light and God’s existence by claiming that the real world is actually virtual.

ComputerWorld magazine recently profiled Brian Whitworth, an information scientist out of New Zealand who recently published a paper entitled “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality” that has generated tremendous attention and discussion on blogs. The article discusses responses from bloggers at the New Scientist blog and allows Whitworth to respond to some of New Scientist challenges.

Whitworth’s article argues that the universe is a ‘virtual reality created by information processing,’ and is a system that requires booting up. Whitworth says that the Big Bang, for example, could, logically, have been a virtual event. “Every virtual system must be booted up,” he suggests.

Far fetched? Here is a snippet of his article regarding the origin of the universe:

“Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information-processing,” he writes.

“Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being [about] how information-processing creates space-time, and the latter [being about] how it creates energy and matter.”

Since the advent of virtual worlds, there has always been a perceived separation between virtuality and reality. While I’ve long advocated that this language may have been fine when we were talking about game environments and MMORPGs, the ‘membrane’ has long since dissolved. Whitworth’s hypothesis moves to close the gap from the other direction, arguing not that virtual worlds are more “real” than we imagined, but rather that the real may be more virtual.