  This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created
by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of
modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is
familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is
usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the
world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional
space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information,
matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the
many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If
the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no
longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is
suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality
is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how
core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could
derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity
and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates
space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.
