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IPFS News Link • Entertainment: Games

How Real Is Reality? It's Rather Hard to Tell

• http://motherboard.vice.com

I'd like to think that in the old man bars of SimCity the old timers chatter about just how time flies. It boggles the mind, they say, to think that the same mayor has been in charge since they were young'uns, and that as these denizens get older, time just seems to keep picking up pace, even if it drags on at times—or, occasionally, feels like everything is at a standstill.

Once you really start diving into the academic nuts and bolts of reality, you start to realize just how tenuous our definition of what's real actually is. Take time. We don't have someone out there flipping the speed of our world in and out of Cheetah Speed, as is the case for our SimCity residents, but sometimes it feels like that, doesn't it?

This week on Motherboard we're celebrating our Perfect Worlds theme, which aims to probe at the real by exploring simulations. SimCity is a great case study, for as brilliant as the franchise is, it still makes for a poor analog of real-life cities, which are infinitely more complex. That's an obvious conclusion, but it's a point that's inherent to our own conception of reality.

Think about time. Time, one of the more strictly quantifiable measures in our universe, is bendy. Even the most precise clock in the world, which relies on trapping atoms of strontium in a lattice of lasers, is still beset by a bit of uncertainty. We intuitively assume that time moves forward, a perception that's surprisingly difficult to model. While Einstein's special relativity has seen challenges on the road to physics' holy grail, the theory of everything, there remains a natural allure to the concept of spacetime—the idea that matter and time are woven together in a fabric that's as malleable as we tend to perceive.

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