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Letter: An answer to the simulation mystery?

Published 30 December 2025

From Tim Rafferty Aargau, Switzerland

I very much enjoyed Miriam Frankel’s article “Do we live in a simulation?”. But she inadvertently hints at an interesting theory and then ignores it. Just assume, as others have, that this is a simulation designed entirely as a time machine to study humanity. After setting the “internal” clock of the simulation to run many times faster than any external clock, the observers could see how, from an initial condition, this particular set of events would play out (13/20 December, p 54).

But they would only need to simulate our ability to observe the universe, not manifest every aspect of it until that point “in time” when the “thing” met with our observation. This deals with the “no computer or power source could be big enough to cope with the load of simultaneously simulating everything” problem.

Issue no. 3576 published 3 January 2026

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