Are We Living In "The Matrix?" It Might Be Testable

First, apologies.  I've been neglecting "Bug Reports" in favor of writing that actually pays money: contributing to www.cracked.com.  (If you've come here from there, hello and welcome, BTW).  I'm also working on a screenplay for an indy-style movie; the working title is "Jesus Versus The Mushrooms."  It's envisioned as a stoner-style comedy in the Harold and Kumar tradition, albeit with heavily Gnostic and Fortean overtones.

But now, back to Bug Reports.  One of our staples here is experiments which might prove that we're actually living in "The Matrix."  We dealt with it in our very first post.    And followed up here.

Of course, proving the universe isn't a hologram (or else a really fine-grained one) doesn't mean we're not living in a computer simulation.  This article in Technology Review explains how we might test for such a scenario.  Describing how a supercomputer would simulate a small part of the universe, they write:

Today, we get an answer of sorts from Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, and a few pals....
They examine, in particular, high energy processes, which probe smaller regions of space as they get more energetic What they find is interesting. They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That’s because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself. So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles...
Beane and co calculate that the lattice spacing imposes some additional features on the spectrum. “The most striking feature…is that the angular distribution of the highest energy components would exhibit cubic symmetry in the rest frame of the lattice, deviating significantly from isotropy,” they say.In other words, the cosmic rays would travel preferentially along the axes of the lattice, so we wouldn’t see them equally in all directions. That’s a measurement we could do now with current technology....
But the calculations by Beane and co are not without some important caveats. One problem is that the computer lattice may be constructed in an entirely different way to the one envisaged by these guys.  Another is that this effect is only measurable if the lattice cut off is the same as the GZK cut off. This occurs when the lattice spacing is about 10^-12 femtometers. If the spacing is significantly smaller than that, we’ll see nothing.

In other words, if we don't find what they predict, we're not out of the woods - we could still be a computer program, just a different kind.  (And that's assuming we're not something really different, such as an analog computer)

But if they DO find it?  Would it strongly suggest the universe is the result of intelligent design?  Not the Judeo-Christian God, necessarily, but a Demiurge of some sort?  One would think so.  Of course one can think of objections: if the universe is infinite, for example, than such "computer" simulations would arise by chance.

Still, the last couple of centuries have not been kind  to religious faith.  First, Galileo's telescope showed the universe wasn't a perfect Aristotelian mechanism. Then we had Darwin,  geographers discovering the world was more than 6000 years old, and Higher Criticism telling us Scriptures weren't written by the people (Moses, etc) who we'd always thought had written them.  It's hardly been worth getting out of bed on Sunday morning.

Scientific proof that we were created by an intelligence greater than ourselves would turn society upside down.  Part of me wants to see it for the sheer David and Goliath aspect.  But the cautious part of me knows that in David and Goliath contests, it's always smart to bet on Goliath.