The Architect's Code

Nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato asked whether the world we see is only shadows on a wall. In 2003, an Oxford philosopher asked whether it is a computer simulation. They were asking the same question.

In between, early Christians buried books in the Egyptian desert saying the world had been built, and built by the wrong hands. A French philosopher sat by his fire and wondered whether some powerful being was feeding him a false world. Then, in the twentieth century, the physicists joined in.

Inside

• The jar found at Nag Hammadi, and the craftsman who built a flawed world
• Why the numbers that run the universe seem set on a knife edge
• "It from bit": the physicist who said reality comes down to information
• The double-slit experiment, where light behaves differently once a record exists
• Error-correcting code found inside the equations of physics
• The molecule people say lets them see behind the scenes of reality
• Glitches, déjà vu and the Mandela effect
• The 231 gates of the Book of Creation, and a world built from letters and numbers

Every chapter follows the same pattern: what the source actually says, what the evidence shows, and what the author thinks it's really saying. Quotes are given word for word and sourced, and the sceptics get a full chapter of their own.

There's even an interlude written by artificial intelligence, asked what it's like to live inside a made world, and to work out what it would cost to build one.

If it's code, who wrote it?