- EvolutionFM
- Posts
- Why Quantum Physicists Know Reality Is a Simulation But Won't Say It, and What It Reveals About Consciousness (Thomas Campbell)
Why Quantum Physicists Know Reality Is a Simulation But Won't Say It, and What It Reveals About Consciousness (Thomas Campbell)
Scott Britton
June 12, 2026
If you like reading or listening to this podcast, leave us a review or share it so more people can discover it 🙏
“It's not a weird science at all. It's a rational science. You just have to understand the nature of reality.” (16:11 in this cast)
Thomas Campbell is a nuclear physicist, consciousness researcher, and the author of the My Big TOE Trilogy. He spent eight and a half years researching consciousness inside Bob Monroe's lab and the next 33 years building a model that explains the physical world and the world of consciousness with one set of rules.
In this conversation, he lays out a discovery that the experiments that define quantum physics keep returning the same verdict. Reality is not made of stuff. It is made of information. The physicists who work at that level know it because their own data forced them to it. What they will not do is finish the sentence because the end of the sentence is that we are living inside a computed reality, and the very next question after that is one no instrument on Earth can answer.
He is the rare physicist who finished the sentence out loud, and what makes him impossible to wave off is that he did not start with mysticism. He started with a debugging session he could not explain, demanded evidence for everything after that, and followed the data straight through the door his colleagues keep walking past.
This episode is sponsored by my book Conscious Accomplishment - How to Use Personal Achievement for Spiritual Growth.
If you’re looking to blend consciousness expansion while creating the material life you desire, pick up your copy today!
This episode is great for:
Anyone who wants simulation theory from someone who reached it through physics, not science fiction
People with a technical or scientific background who are tired of belief and want a chain of reasoning
Skeptics who want to know precisely what the experiments say and exactly where mainstream physics goes silent
Anyone who senses there is a reason a theory this well supported stays on the fringe, and wants to hear what that reason actually is
Ideas that really stuck out to me:
The verdict is already in, and physicists are the ones who delivered it. The particle physicists and quantum theorists closest to the data broadly agree that reality is information-based, and the proof is in how they model the world. Treat an electron as a tiny chunk of matter and the math collapses but treat it as a point carrying the attributes of mass and charge exactly how you would represent it inside a computer, and it works flawlessly. The double slit experiment and hundreds that followed all say the same thing, and on this point the field is simply correct.
Once it is information the conclusion is not optional. If reality is information, it is computable. If it is computable, it can be a virtual reality. There is no honest way to accept the first step and refuse the last because each one is just the obvious consequence of the one before it. The information is the fingerprint, and it points at a computed world.
Here is the exact door they will not open. The instant you admit reality is a computed virtual reality the elephant walks in. Who is the programmer? Where is this reality being created? Who is creating it, and why? Physics has no apparatus that touches any of that so following the logic one step further would unleash a storm the field has nothing to say about. So the whole discipline stops at the words "information based" and refuses to read the next line of its own proof.
Here is the staircase physics built and then stopped climbing, which is the whole story in one picture:
A physicist crossed that line because a bug forced his hand. As a graduate student, Thomas was stuck debugging a program on punch cards when in a meditative state, he watched his deck scroll past with certain cards lit up in red, repunched exactly those, and the program ran. Two held key punch errors so small, about a tenth of a millimeter off that no eye could have spotted them and no part of his ordinary mind could have known. For a young physicist who believed only in what he could measure it hit like a ton of bricks, and the materialist explanation died on the spot.
Physics studies the screen and refuses to study the thing watching it. Thomas found he could use mind to change the physical world, but nothing physical could touch consciousness itself. A head injury can wreck your memory and your gait, yet it does nothing to the consciousness behind the character. That tells you which side of the screen is rendered, and it puts consciousness upstream of matter exactly where the field will not look.
"A computer cannot compute itself" is a proof of where the programmer sits, and physics could run it. From inside any virtual reality, the player and the computer running it both have to be non-physical because no computer can compute itself from within its own output. That drops the programmer into the one place physics agreed never to look outside the picture. Think of a video game: you are not the barbarian on the screen you are the one making its choices, and your body is just the rule set for what your character can do.
Physics spends its whole life reverse engineering the simulation and calls it science. Thomas describes this universe as a virtual reality that was not coded by hand but grown from a set of initial conditions that in his words start to look like the Big Bang plus a rule set tuned again and again until the constants were dialed in to many decimal places. The job of science, he notes, is to dig out the rules of this reality, which is exactly what you would do to decode a simulation you woke up inside of. The field is already doing the reverse engineering and refusing to say what it is reverse engineering.
The deepest reason for the silence is not scientific. It is moral. Materialism is the belief that physical stuff is all there is, and it comes with an ethic of control, power, and force, which in our culture mostly wears the face of money. His model comes with the opposite ethic of cooperation, caring, compassion, and love, which in his physics is literally how a system of many minds lowers its entropy. To say reality is a simulation is to announce that kindness is structural, a far more dangerous thing to admit than any equation, and he believes that if it ever lands the whole world gets gentler.
We only made it through maybe a third of what Thomas wanted to cover before the clock ran out so call this part one. Even so, it is the strongest case for the simulation I have ever heard precisely because it does not begin with the simulation.
It begins with a bug, a demand for evidence, and a refusal to flinch at the conclusion.
I hope you enjoy this conversation!
- Scott
If you like reading or listening to this podcast, leave us a review or share it so more people can discover it🙏
Subscribe for more content on Consciousness and the Boundaries of Human Potential!!
Recommended Resources:
Episode Transcript
Show Notes
00:00 - Introduction to Consciousness Exploration
06:02 - The Journey into Meditation and Consciousness
11:51 - Experiments in Consciousness and Reality
17:50 - The Theory of Everything: My Big TOE
23:55 - Reality as an Information System
29:49 - Modeling Consciousness as an Information System
32:41 - The Evolution of Consciousness and Information Systems
36:32 - Social Systems and the Dynamics of Love and Fear
41:14 - The Role of Free Will in Consciousness
46:32 - Virtual Realities as Training Grounds for Consciousness
49:10 - Ethics of Materialism vs. Cooperation and Love