Just out of interest, did anybody else bother to read the paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.1847v2.pdf) on which that well-known scientific journal Wired based its claim that the Universe was a computer simulation just like it is in that movie with the slo-mo gunfights and the really cool if somewhat impractical leather coats?
I admit that I'm seriously out of practice, so I skipped the math, nearly all of which I've forgotten how to do over all those years when it didn't exactly come up on a daily basis. But if I understand the rest of this paper correctly, the authors are suggesting ways in which we might be able to determine whether or not we live inside a very complex version of The Sims, not offering any evidence that we actually do.
Some of their suggested proofs involve areas of physics we don't fully understand yet, and might or might not work if we did - a situation in which you can make any conjecture you like. Others involve distances so miniscule that we can't possibly check them out. In their conclusions, they suggest that their proposed "cubic lattice structure" may be so fine that it only becomes visible "several orders of magnitude below the Planck scale". Or, put another way, using current technology, to test that claim, you'd need something like the Large Hadron Collider, only with a diameter at least the size of the orbit of Neptune!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this paper doesn't seem to offer any even remotely testable conclusions whatsoever. Also, the references to the hypothetical Universe-simulators making a silly mistake and allowing the Universal Constant to be non-zero, despite their meticulous attention to detail in every other department, reads to anyone who knows the history of physics like a subtle joke at the expense of Albert Einstein. Frankly, I think this entire paper may be an extremely rarified PhD-student prank. And if it isn't, it doesn't really matter, because there's no practical way anyone can prove or disprove anything in it for a century or two at the very least. By which time, whether they were joking or not, the authors will no longer be worried about having their grants revoked. Just saying.
