Catherine Heymans

We may never be able to satisfactorily answer this question, but perhaps the best way of investigating its feasibility is by looking how we might go about creating a simulation universe ourselves.

In this episode, we're joined by Professor Catherine Heymans, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, who investigates this question in her new book, How to Design a Universe: The Science of Real and Virtual Worlds, the royalties of which will be given to the Royal Observatory Trust, which supports astronomy youth projects across Scotland.

She tells us what the current extent of our knowledge tells us about the way the universe operates, explains why we'd need an enormous amount of computing power to generate a simulation universe, and investigates the question of why us, or a more advanced civilization, might attempt to do this in the first place.

So welcome to the podcast.