You're walking down the street and suddenly feel like you’ve been there before. A strange déjà vu. The same faces. The same breeze. The same billboard. You blink, and it passes. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe it’s a small bug in a much bigger program — reality itself. It may sound like science fiction, but a growing number of scientists, philosophers, and even tech entrepreneurs believe we might be living inside a computer simulation; not a metaphorical one but a literal, coded simulation where everything from stars and galaxies to our thoughts and choices are governed by lines of logic, processed on a cosmic server. If this sounds absurd, consider this: some of the brightest minds on Earth are taking the question seriously.

The simulation hypothesis took a more formal shape in 2003, when philosopher Nick Bostrom at Oxford University proposed a startling idea: if advanced civilisations in the future can run highly realistic simulations of their ancestors, then statistically, it is far more likely that we are one of those simulations than the original biological beings. Think of it this way — if one “real” world spawns millions of simulations, the odds that you’re living in the base reality shrink dramatically. Just like you’re more likely to be watching a reboot or remake on TV than the original event.

At first, this sounds like pure fantasy. But here’s where it gets strange: physics itself is starting to look… digital. We used to think the universe was continuous — like a smooth canvas. But quantum mechanics suggests the opposite: everything comes in chunks. Matter is made of atoms. Light comes in photons. Even time and space might be quantised — made of tiny, indivisible units. Like pixels on a screen. Physicists have even found that the laws of nature — gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces — are so neatly organised, they feel almost... programmed. The equations are elegant, consistent, and strangely clean. Why should the universe behave so perfectly, unless it’s following a script?