On a warm afternoon last fall, Steven Caron, a technical artist at the video-game company Quixel, stood at the edge of a redwood grove in the Oakland Hills. “Cross your eyes, kind of blur your eyes, ...

It might seem obvious that the world around us is real. Yet as computers have become ever more powerful, it seems increasingly possible that everything we experience could be nothing more than code ...

For years, the idea that we might be living inside a vast computer program has drifted from philosophy seminars into blockbuster movies and Reddit threads. Now a group of theoretical physicists say ...