Children will deploy all sorts of tactics to avoid going to bed. Catherine Heymans’s youngest had a canny one: to distract his mum, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, UK, he asked her meaty questions about science. One night a few years ago, he posed one of the oldest chestnuts of all: could the reality we live in be a simulation?
For most parents, this would have been the cue to switch off the bedroom light. For Heymans, who is also Astronomer Royal for Scotland, the question was harder to ignore. Computer simulations are an integral part of her everyday work.
Astronomers can’t slip a galaxy into the laboratory or wait a few billion years to see how one evolves, so they routinely build universes in code and test them against what telescopes reveal. We’ve glimpsed before the big bang and it’s not what we expected Her son’s question percolated in her mind during a trip to a telescope in Chile, where, beneath the black skies of the Atacama desert, it began to take on a life of its own. Eventually, Heymans wrote a book to answer it.
New Scientist caught up with her to hear her unique approach to this conundrum, whether it is remotely possible to solve – and, crucially, whether her son was convinced by her answer. Jacklin Kwan: I have to say, “Do we live in a simulation?” is an awfully precocious question for a child to ask. Catherine Heymans: I think nearly all parents find their children do tend to ask a lot of surprisingly deep questions.
That is certainly my experience – and I don’t like not knowing the answers! That’s part of being a scientist, isn’t it? It became a game: they would try to get out of going to sleep by asking me trickier and trickier questions, because I’d get really into it and suddenly their bedtime would be missed because I was so excited.
Anyway, they struck gold. I was running off on an observing trip to the Paranal Observatory in Chile, so I was going to be gone for a long time, and they didn’t like it when I went away. They obviously thought: what’s the trickiest question we can ask her, so she has to stay and answer it?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
