The 1999 sci-fi action film, ‘The Matrix’, is still regarded as one of the best and most visually stunning movies of all time. If you remember, the film featured a cascading green code that rained down the screen.
That code has a surprising, rather weird, origin story behind it. It’s not anything remotely related to a cryptic computer program, encrypted data, alien language, or some text with a deeper philosophical meaning. In fact, they were not real codes at all. On the contrary, it was sushi, the Japanese dish. Can you believe it?
The Matrix depicts a futuristic world in which humans are kept in pods and used as batteries for a machine-ruled society. Under the influence of a reality-simulating computer system, called the Matrix, humans believe they are living their lives as usual. Computer hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves) meets the mysterious guru Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), who presents him with the choice of the red pill or the blue pill. As Morpheus describes, “You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Neo takes the red pill and wakes up in the real world.
Are we living in a simulated reality like in the movie ‘The Matrix’? Dr. Melvin Vopson, a UK-based physicist, suggests that gravity might be evidence we’re living in a virtual world, with the universe acting like a giant computer. His theory echoes the 1999 film’s concept of a simulated universe, but with a scientific twist. Dr. Vopson’s research suggests that gravity might be a form of data organisation, similar to computer code compression. He proposes that the universe’s tendency to pull objects with mass towards the Earth’s core is analogous to how computers optimise data, supporting the idea that our universe could be a simulated or computational construct.
