Physicist: The entire universe might be a neural network

It's not every day that we come across a paper that attempts to redefine reality. But in a provocative preprint uploaded to arXiv this summer, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth named Vitaly Vanchurin attempts to reframe reality in a particularly eye-opening way -- suggesting that we're living inside a massive neural network that governs everything around us. In other words, he wrote in the paper, it's a "possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network." For years, physicists have attempted to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. The first posits that time is universal and absolute, while the latter argues that time is relative, linked to the fabric of space-time.