system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: I've read that the simulation hypothesis is extremely unlikely because of something called Lorentz Invariance, but I don't know enough about physics to understand why.
gpt
LmOver isn't quite right. You've got it right, though! Lorentz invariance is a symmetry (think - something you can do to an experiment without changing the results) of spacetime that can be easily understood as rotations (plus "boosts" - think rotations between space and time). If the universe was a simulation, then the most practical way to compute anything in it would be to have a grid defining every point in space. However, the moment you have a well-defined grid on your spacetime, you break Lorentz invariance - you can't rotate by any tiny angle you want - only specific intervals of angles would maintain the symmetry (think a square can only be rotated 90 degrees at a time). But, Lorentz invariance is a fundamental symmetry of the laws of physics that we think the universe obeys. If it didn't obey this symmetry, we certainly would have noticed it by now. In fact, there are very strong experimental bounds on the maximal size of the grid before we would notice it - and it would be way smaller than anything we could measure, if it exists.