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Physicists Say The Matrix Can’t Exist
Published about 2 months ago • 8 min read
Ines Lee Lead Writer at VeMail
Hi Reader, Hurricane Melissa tore through the Caribbean last week as a Category 5 storm, killing at least 50 people and leaving 76% of buildings damaged in Jamaica's Black River. Seismometers hundreds of miles away in Florida recorded its approach like an earthquake. Scientists say this kind of data could help reconstruct hurricanes from before satellites existed and, more importantly, track whether storms are intensifying as the planet warms. (Early signs say yes.) This week, we explore some stories where small tweaks in physics and chemistry could steer climate outcomes more than we’d expect.
Coming up this week:
🤖 Physicists claim The Matrix is mathematically impossible 🍅 Scientists turn food waste into jet fuel 🧪 This tiny chemical tweak cuts synthetic fuel emissions by 99% + More
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Physicists Claim The Matrix Is Mathematically Impossible
What if you're in The Matrix right now? What if this sentence, this screen, your entire life were code running on some advanced civilization's supercomputer? The simulation hypothesis has captivated sci-fi fans for decades and made philosophers scratch their heads since Descartes wondered if an evil demon was deceiving his senses. Now physicists are saying it can't be true.
The core argument: In 1931, mathematician Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently complex logical system contains true statements that can't be proven within that system. A classic example is "This true statement is not provable." If you could prove it, it'd be false and therefore a contradiction. If you can't prove it, then it's true, but your system is incomplete. Either way, pure computation hits a wall.
Modern quantum gravity suggests that even spacetime emerges from something deeper: pure information in what physicists call a "Platonic realm". The researchers argue that if this informational foundation contains Gödelian truths (truths that exist but can't be computed step-by-step), then reality has aspects no algorithm can capture. And since every simulation must follow programmed rules, the universe can't be one.
"We have demonstrated that it is impossible to describe all aspects of physical reality using a computational theory of quantum gravity," Faizal says. "Therefore, no physically complete and consistent theory of everything can be derived from computation alone. Rather, it requires a non-algorithmic understanding, which is more fundamental than the computational laws of quantum gravity and therefore more fundamental than spacetime itself.”
It's an elegant argument, though it rests on a big assumption: that reality's foundation truly is non-algorithmic. The work moves simulation theory from philosophy into mathematics, but not everyone will necessarily accept the premises. Still, if the team is right, this would make The Matrix scenario mathematically impossible.
TL;DR: Physicists argue the universe can't be a computer simulation because reality contains truths no algorithm can capture. Using Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the team claims some aspects of the universe are fundamentally non-computable
CHEMISTRY
Scientists Turn Cafeteria Scraps Into Jet Fuel
The clear liquid in Sabrina Summers' reactor used to be cafeteria scraps. Now it's jet fuel. Her team at the University of Illinois pressure-cooked food waste at extreme temperatures, stripped out the impurities, and turned it into aviation fuel.
The process, published in Nature Communications, works like this: convert food waste into biocrude oil using hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL), clean it up, then refine it with hydrogen and a cobalt-molybdenum catalyst. What emerges are hydrocarbons within the jet-fuel range. The result passed pre-screening tests set by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), meaning it's ready for further certification and real-world testing.
"HTL basically mimics the natural formation of crude oil in the Earth," Summers explains. "It uses high heat and pressure to convert wet biomass into a biocrude oil".
Here’s why this matters: Over 30% of the world's food gets wasted every year at every stage of the supply chain. Most of it rots in landfills, releasing methane. Aviation, meanwhile, is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize. According to the study’s life-cycle analysis, the process improved energy circularity by 31 % and carbon circularity by 17 % compared with conventional jet fuel. Scale it up, and it could help decarbonize aviation while keeping millions of tons of organic waste out of landfills.
TL;DR: Researchers converted food waste into FAA-standard jet fuel using hydrothermal liquefaction and cobalt-molybdenum catalysis. The process tackles both aviation emissions and food waste simultaneously.
CLIMATE
This Tiny Chemical Tweak Cuts Synthetic Fuel Emissions by 99%
Industrial plants that turn coal and gas into liquid fuel have always had a problem: they waste a third of their carbon as CO₂ emissions. Now, a chemist in China has found a way to nearly eliminate that waste by adding a single chemical in microscopic amounts.
Ding Ma's team at Peking University discovered that adding roughly 20 parts per million of methyl bromide (a bromine-containing compound) to the reaction blocks the pathway that creates CO₂. The result: CO₂ emissions dropped from about 33% to less than 1% (≈ 99 % reduction in carbon lost as CO₂), and nearly every carbon atom now ends up as usable fuel instead of greenhouse gas.
The process they fixed - Fischer–Tropsch synthesis - has been converting syngas (a blend of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) into liquid fuels for a century. Nazi Germany used it to power tanks. Apartheid South Africa used it to bypass oil embargoes. Today, iron-based Fischer-Tropsch plants produce over two-thirds of the world's synthetic fuels, making diesel, jet fuel, and chemicals worth billions.
But the chemistry has always been dirty. The same iron catalyst that builds fuel molecules also helps water react with carbon monoxide to form CO₂ - a side reaction that throws away massive amounts of valuable carbon. For a hundred years, that's just been the price of making synthetic fuel.
Ma's team showed that bromine atoms from the additive coat the catalyst surface and selectively block the CO₂-forming pathway without stopping fuel production. It makes the process both cleaner and potentially more cost-efficient, because less raw material gets wasted. Even better: it works in existing plants with no major modifications. Synfuels China is already moving to commercialize it. For large facilities currently emitting hundreds of thousands of tons of CO₂ per year, the additive could cut emissions by hundreds of thousands of tons annually
TL;DR: Adding ~20 ppm methyl bromide to Fischer–Tropsch fuel synthesis cuts CO₂ emissions from ~33% to <1%. The bromine blocks waste-producing side reactions, making fuel production both cleaner and more carbon-efficient.
In Other News
The LHC may have been running a secret experiment for years. A Physical Review Letters study shows the LHC's beams could naturally emit axion-like particles that collide with photons, turning the collider into an accidental axion factory. Re-examining 2016 proton–lead data might reveal dark matter physics that's been staring us in the face for years.
China’s analog chip outruns Nvidia’s by 1,000×. Chinese researchers built an analog resistive-RAM chip that merges analog speed with digital precision, achieving 1,000× GPU throughput and 100× better energy efficiency than Nvidia’s flagship H100 GPU on benchmark tasks. It solves analog computing’s century-old precision problem and could transform AI and 6G hardware.
Tiny virus-filled needles could make food poisoning a thing of the past. Engineers created food-safe microneedle patches that inject bacteria-killing viruses into foods, eliminating up to 99.9 % of E. coli in tests. This innovation could transform food packaging into an active shield against contamination.
Most Americans don’t know this popular habit raises cancer risk. A national survey found that more than half of U.S. adults don’t know that alcohol increases cancer risk. Despite alcohol being classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, fewer than 4 in 10 recognise the link. Improving awareness could play a pivotal role in prevention.
2024 worsened many major indicators of climate risk. An international scientific coalition reports that 22 of 34 planet-scale indicators (ice, oceans, carbon, forests) are at record or rapidly deteriorating levels. Although mitigation pathways exist, the opportunity to limit warming is shrinking fast.
Giant magnetic anomaly (from >500 million years ago) finally explained. New paleomagnetic data show that what appeared to be extremely rapid continental motion ~560 million years ago was instead caused by an unstable geomagnetic field. The discovery has major implications for deep-time tectonics and Earth-dynamo research.
Common drugs change your gut for several years. An extensive study found that common medications (including antidepressants and beta-blockers) can leave a lasting imprint on the gut microbiome for years, though the health impact of those changes remains unclear.
This Week in History
November 4, 1845. Michael Faraday hung a sample of heavy glass between the poles of an electromagnet and observed it turning edge-on instead of aligning like a compass needle. Faraday had uncovered diamagnetism - a subtle property whereby materials are weakly repelled by a magnetic field. He demonstrated that magnetism isn’t just something iron can do. It’s a response built into all matter. This insight would later become a key piece in Faraday’s broader field theory of electromagnetism, which his successor James Clerk Maxwell turned into the equations that underpin modern physics.
November 5, 1879. James Clerk Maxwell died on this day at the age of 48 in Cambridge, ending the life of a scientist whose equations reshaped our understanding of the universe. His landmark work A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873) united electricity, magnetism and light into a single theoretical framework and revealed that light itself is an electromagnetic wave.
November 5, 1891 & 1906. Marie Skłodowska (later Curie) stepped into the lecture halls of Sorbonne University as a penniless Polish immigrant, pursuing physics and mathematics despite often fainting from hunger. Fifteen years later, on 5 November 1906, she returned - this time as the first woman to teach physics at the Sorbonne - filling the chair left vacant by her husband, Pierre Curie. Her inaugural lectures on ion theory and radioactivity marked the rise of a new era for science and for women in academia.
This Week’s Puzzle
🧩
The 12 Pool Balls
You have 12 pool balls that are identical in size and appearance.
But one of them is slightly different. It could be heavier or lighter than the rest.
You also have a classic balance scale. Each weighing gives you three possible outcomes:
Left = Right (they balance)
Left > Right (left side heavier)
Left < Right (right side heavier)
Here’s the challenge: You’re allowed only three weighings. Using those three weighings, can you determine which ball is the odd one and whether it’s heavier or lighter?
Until next time,
The Ve Team 👋
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