Jim Gates asks me to call him Jim. “I am a simple country theoretical physicist and am not at all enamored of titles,” he says in his reply to my email requesting an interview.

“I want to be very clear,” he wrote. “I am not a supporter of the idea that our reality could be a simulation.”

Gates is a professor of theoretical physics at Brown University who served on President Barack Obama’s scientific advisory council. “The main problem with the so-called simulation hypothesis is that it fails to meet a requirement of any proposal claiming to be a scientific one,” Gates said. The stern exasperation of his tone was only slightly belied by the fact that the entire message was written in Comic Sans. “There is no way to falsify this idea.”

“It may surprise you to hear this is my view,” he went on, “as there is a vast amount of online content dedicated to the idea that my own research has driven me to be a supporter of this proposal.” Gates’ impatience at the question was, in hindsight, understandable. His landmark work in theoretical physics has been, it turns out, somewhat co-opted by the simulation crowd.

Such a simulation would need to reproduce not an entire universe, but just enough of it to trick its inhabitants into thinking their universe was infinite.

Gates had discovered “error-correcting codes” in the fundamental equations of string theory, and many had pointed to that discovery as evidence of the programming activity of the type of programmer Bostrom’s theory described. On the internet,

In fact, the problem for both Gates and Kovrizhin — the problem that has led to all this interdisciplinary sniping — is a fundamental one: The theory is not falsifiable, which is to say, it cannot by definition be either proved or disproved. “This is a question that I thought was settled by Descartes back in the 1600s,” Gates said. “His famous conclusion was ‘I think, therefore I am’… not ‘I think therefore I am simulation.’”

But I found myself becoming dissatisfied with the physicists’ approach to the question. Kovrizhin had shown that it was impossible for a universe to contain a computer powerful enough to contain a total replication of itself. But it seemed to me that my universe was much smaller than that. What did it matter if, on a fundamental level, reality itself was untrickable, I found myself thinking, if that whole question can be circumvented by tricking only me?