If You Hack The Code Of Reality, You Become God | Dr Melvin Vopson

ELI5/TLDR

A physicist named Melvin Vopson thinks the universe might be running on something like computer code, and that “information” is a real, physical, weighable thing — maybe even the stuff that 95% of the universe is secretly made of. From there he leaps to bigger claims: that we live in a simulation, that whoever cracks the code “becomes God,” and that the Bible’s “in the beginning was the Word” is really saying “in the beginning was the code.” Some of his starting observations come from real, published physics. Almost all of the dramatic conclusions are speculation wearing a lab coat. The conversation is two people getting happily lost in deep questions for an hour and a half.

The Full Story

Where this starts: information as a physical thing

The least crazy idea here is also the only one with a real foothold, so let’s plant our feet there first.

Think about the design of a house. Before the house exists, there’s a blueprint. Before the blueprint, there’s a picture in the architect’s head. The microphone on the table, the book, the glass of water — every made object existed first as an arrangement in someone’s mind. Vopson’s opening question is simple: that arrangement, that pattern, that information — is it real? Is it physical, part of the universe like the table is? Or is it some ghostly nothing floating outside the rules?

“Is information itself physical?”

He says it’s physical. And he goes further — he calls it a fifth state of matter, sitting alongside solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. That last part is his own framing, not textbook physics, so flag it. But the underlying instinct — that information is woven into the fabric of reality rather than floating above it — is not fringe at all. It traces back to genuinely serious people.

One is Claude Shannon, the man who, in the 1940s, gave us the bit — the basic unit of information, the one or zero. Shannon was solving a practical problem: how to send a message down a noisy phone line without it turning to mush. Out of that came “information theory,” the math underneath all digital computing. Shannon also borrowed a word from physics — entropy — to measure how much information a message carries.

Here’s the bridge that lit Vopson up. Entropy already meant something in physics: roughly, a measure of disorder, of how scrambled a system is. Shannon used the same word, the same kind of math, for information. Two fields, same machinery. Vopson’s career-defining move was to ask whether that overlap is a coincidence or a clue.

The second law, and the new one Vopson claims to have found

To follow the next step, you need one piece of established physics: the second law of thermodynamics. It says that left alone, things get more disordered over time. A hot coffee cools. A sandcastle erodes. Smoke spreads out and never gathers back into the cigarette. The universe, as a whole, is supposed to be sliding toward more chaos.

“The second law of thermodynamics dictates that the universe should evolve to more chaos, more disorder.”

And yet — Vopson points out — we see the opposite all over the place. Symmetry. Order. Snowflakes, the spiral of a galaxy, the bilateral neatness of a face, the clean repeating patterns in the laws of physics themselves. The physicist Richard Feynman once admitted nobody really knows where natural symmetry comes from.

In a 2023 paper, Vopson claims to have found a counterweight: a “second law of information dynamics.” Where physical entropy climbs toward disorder, he says, information entropy slides the other way — toward order, toward less. Like two hands on a balance. His interpretation: the universe is optimizing itself, compressing, trimming waste — exactly what a computer does when it’s short on power and memory.

Think of it like zipping a file before you email it. Symmetry, in his telling, is just compression — a symmetric shape carries less information than a lopsided one, so a universe that “prefers” symmetry is a universe that prefers small file sizes. That, he argues, is the fingerprint of something computational running underneath.

Important caveat: this “second law of information dynamics” is his claim, published in his own venues, and it is not accepted physics. Mainstream physicists have not embraced it. When he says “I found a new law of physics,” read it as “I proposed one,” because the rest of the field has not signed off.

Speed limits, slowdowns, and the laptop analogy

Vopson likes to read the universe’s known limits as signs of a machine straining against its specs.

The speed of light, he suggests, is like a processor’s clock speed — the maximum rate at which the universe can compute. And time dilation near a black hole (where time slows almost to a stop near enormous mass) is, in his picture, the universe “lagging” — like a laptop crawling when you open too many programs at once.

“This is what we see… around very large mass objects like black holes time stops completely… because the universe cannot process.”

Here you should feel the gears slip. Time dilation is real, rock-solid, predicted by Einstein’s general relativity and confirmed countless times. But relativity explains it perfectly well without any computer — it’s about how mass bends spacetime, not about a CPU running hot. Vopson is taking a settled phenomenon and re-narrating it in computer metaphors. The metaphor is evocative; it is not evidence. He’s pattern-matching the universe’s behavior onto a laptop because laptops are what we know.

The hunt for “the code” and “the data”

If we’re inside a program, Vopson says, like Mario inside his game, there are two things to look for: the code, and the data.

For the code, he points to two things. One is his compression argument above. The other is more striking: in 2012, physicist James Gates, while working on the deep math of string theory, reportedly found structures in the equations that resembled error-correcting code — the same kind of self-checking code that keeps your web browser from garbling data. Vopson’s question: why would communication-engineering tricks show up baked into fundamental physics, unless the universe is, at bottom, running on similar principles?

It’s a genuinely intriguing observation, and Gates is a real, respected physicist who really did say something like this. But “resembles” is carrying a lot of weight. Mathematical structures recur across wildly different fields all the time without implying anyone coded them. A pattern that looks like error-correction isn’t proof of a programmer.

For the data, Vopson reaches for one of the great open mysteries in real cosmology. We can only account for about 5% of the universe — the stars, planets, gas, everything telescopes can see. The other 95% is “dark matter” and “dark energy,” names physicists gave to effects they can measure but cannot explain. Vopson’s pitch: what if that missing 95% is the data and code of the simulation? In a 2019 paper he proposed a “mass-energy-information equivalence principle” — the idea that information doesn’t just exist physically but has actual mass — and estimated it’d take roughly 10⁹⁶ bits to account for all the dark matter.

“Maybe that 95% is actually the code.”

This is the moment to be clearest. Dark matter is a real, unsolved problem. “Information has mass and dark matter is the simulation’s hard drive” is a conjecture stacked on a conjecture. Vopson actually proposed a real lab experiment to test whether information has mass and crowdfunded for it (he raised about 2% of what he needed). That impulse — let’s test it — is the honest, scientific part of him. But until that experiment runs and succeeds, the dark-matter-is-code idea is a story, not a finding.

The fruit fly that woke up

The most arresting stretch of the conversation has the least to do with simulation theory and the most going for it as real news.

In October 2024, a consortium of around 20 universities (the “FlyWire” project) published in Nature the complete wiring diagram of a fruit fly’s brain. Picture this: they froze the brain, sliced it into about 7,000 wafers each 40 nanometers thin — thousands of times thinner than a hair — photographed each slice under an electron microscope, and stitched it all back together with AI. The result is a full map of roughly 130,000 neurons and 50 million connections. They call it a “connectome.” It took ten years.

Then, per Vopson, a San Francisco company called Eon Systems (he places this in March 2026) built a digital fly — a virtual body with 87 joints in a physics engine that simulates gravity and wind — and loaded that brain map into it.

“They just loaded the brain structure into a simulated fly and he started to behave like a real one… nobody programmed it to do this. It just did it.”

No training, no machine learning, no instructions — just the wiring. And the digital fly walked, groomed, hunted for virtual food. The point Vopson draws: the brain’s wiring isn’t just the hardware, it’s the software too. The structure is the behavior.

(A note of caution on the reporting: the FlyWire connectome in Nature is real and well-documented. The “Eon Systems, March 2026” demo is described entirely through Vopson’s retelling here, and a podcast recorded in mid-2026 referencing a “March 2026” result is the kind of detail worth verifying before repeating as fact.)

From here the two men spin off into the questions you’d expect: if you could map a human brain and run it, what wakes up? Is it you, or a copy of you that thinks it’s you? Does it have rights? A soul? They reach no answers, and they cheerfully admit it.

The part where it becomes a Bible study

Then the conversation takes its strangest turn. Vopson reads the opening of the Gospel of John — “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” — and reinterprets “Word” as “code.”

“In the beginning was the code… and the code was God… It means that God is an AI.”

He stresses he’s not trying to do religion, that his real aim is to show religious people their beliefs aren’t opposed to a simulation — both say there was a creator, a beginning, a design. He mentions Hindu Maya, Buddhism, Gnostic traditions, Aboriginal dreaming, all describing the world as illusion, and treats the chorus as suggestive.

Be plain about this: this is not physics. Reinterpreting scripture as source code is a literary move, a vibe, a Rorschach test. It tells you nothing testable. It’s the clearest signal in the whole talk that we’ve left the lab far behind.

”You become God,” free will, and a calmer view of death

The clickbait title comes from a genuine thread in the chat. If reality runs on code, then whoever learns to edit the code could bend physics, break the rules, do the magical. Whoever cracks it controls not just the planet but the universe — hence “you become God.” Vopson nods that some Silicon Valley billionaires (he name-drops the framing, and Elon Musk’s wish to know “what’s outside the simulation”) are reportedly chasing exactly this, possibly for life extension or immortality.

Both men also agree they doubt free will exists — that it feels like an illusion, that we may simply be running a program. And Vopson ends on something quieter and more personal: he says he’s no longer afraid of death, because the conservation laws of physics (energy can’t be destroyed, and, he’d add, information can’t either) mean something of you persists. It’s a transition, not an ending.

“Something remains at the point of death… It’s just a transition to something else. So that is a physics fact.”

That last sentence overreaches. Conservation of energy is bedrock physics. “Therefore something of you survives death” is a metaphysical leap — the energy and information in your body absolutely persist, but as scattered heat and decomposed matter, not as you. Calling that a “physics fact” is exactly the move to watch for throughout: a real principle, stretched one step past where the physics actually goes.

Key Takeaways

Claude Shannon (1940s) defined the bit and “information entropy” — the math behind all digital computing — by borrowing the concept of entropy from physics. The overlap between the two fields is the seed of Vopson’s whole project.
The second law of thermodynamics (real, settled) says systems tend toward disorder. Vopson’s claimed “second law of information dynamics” (his own, not accepted by mainstream physics) says information entropy moves the opposite way, toward order/compression.
Vopson interprets symmetry as compression — a symmetric shape carries less information — and reads the universe’s love of symmetry as evidence it’s optimizing itself like a computer.
He reframes the speed of light as a processor’s clock speed and time dilation near black holes as computational “lag.” Both phenomena are real but are fully explained by relativity, no computer required.
James Gates reportedly found structures resembling error-correcting code inside string theory equations (2012) — Vopson’s strongest “evidence of code.” Real claim, but “resembles” is doing heavy lifting.
Dark matter / dark energy make up ~95% of the universe and are genuinely unexplained. Vopson’s 2019 “mass-energy-information equivalence” paper speculates this missing mass could be the simulation’s data/code (~10⁹⁶ bits). Conjecture, untested.
Vopson designed and crowdfunded a real experiment to test whether information has mass (raised ~2% of the target). The willingness to test is the genuinely scientific part.
The FlyWire connectome (Nature, Oct 2024) is a real, complete wiring map of a fruit fly brain: ~130,000 neurons, ~50 million synapses, built over 10 years from 7,000 electron-microscope slices.
A digital fly loaded with that brain map reportedly behaved like a real fly with no training — suggesting brain structure alone encodes behavior. (The “Eon Systems, March 2026” demo is sourced only to Vopson’s account here.)
Vopson reinterprets “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1) as “the code,” concluding “God is an AI.” This is interpretation, not science.
Both speakers doubt free will exists. Vopson says physics’ conservation laws make him unafraid of death — though “something of you survives” is a metaphysical leap beyond what conservation laws actually state.
Vopson is a real associate professor of physics at the University of Portsmouth and runs the Information Physics Institute.

Claude’s Take

Score: 4/10. This is a charismatic, watchable conversation built on a foundation where the real science and the speculation are blended so smoothly that a casual listener can’t tell where one stops and the other starts. That blend is the problem.

Start with what’s legitimate. Vopson is a credentialed physicist. Information theory is real and profound. The question “is information physical?” is a serious one that serious people (Wheeler’s “it from bit,” Landauer’s principle that erasing a bit costs energy) have wrestled with. Dark matter is a real mystery. The FlyWire connectome is a real, genuinely stunning achievement. And Vopson’s instinct to propose an experiment — to put information-has-mass on the lab bench — is exactly what separates science from philosophy. Credit where due.

Now the trouble. Almost every dramatic claim is a real principle stretched one step too far, then narrated in computer metaphors as if the metaphor were the evidence. Time dilation becomes “lag.” Symmetry becomes “compression.” The speed of light becomes “clock speed.” Each analogy is seductive and each is doing work that the underlying physics doesn’t support — relativity explains all of these with no simulation needed. The “second law of information dynamics” is presented as a discovery (“I found a new law of physics”) when it’s a self-published proposal the field hasn’t accepted. And the John 1:1 “code is God” reading is pure pattern-matching dressed as insight; it’s the tell that we’re in metaphysics, not physics.

The “you become God” title is exactly the clickbait it sounds like — a throwaway riff about editing reality’s source code, blown up into a headline. Nobody is close to hacking any “code of reality”; there’s no established code to hack.

Here’s the cleanest way to hold it: information physics as a research question is respectable; “we live in a simulation and the Bible proves it” is not. The simulation hypothesis is unfalsifiable in its strong form — if a perfect simulation is by definition indistinguishable from reality, then no experiment inside it can ever confirm it, which the speakers themselves cheerfully admit late in the talk. An idea you can never test isn’t physics; it’s a thought you can enjoy.

Worth watching as a tour of genuinely interesting ideas (Shannon, Gates, the connectome) and as a case study in how a real scientist can drift past the edge of his evidence. Not worth taking as a map of how reality actually works. Enjoy the questions; distrust the answers.