Rizwan Virk, The MIT Founder Who Asks If Reality Is a Computation

Rizwan Virk is a technology entrepreneur, investor and author who founded the Play Labs @ MIT accelerator and now writes about whether the universe is a running computation. He is best known for the 2019 book The Simulation Hypothesis, which argues that our universe may be something closer to a vast computer simulation than a fixed physical stage. A sequel, The Simulated Multiverse, followed, and between them the two books brought the strange behaviour of quantum physics to a wide general audience. Virk reached that question not as a working physicist but as a computer scientist and builder who spent years in software and video games. Virk took a bachelor’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later a master’s in management at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. That combination of deep technical training and business instinct shaped a career that moved easily between writing code, founding companies, and investing in startups. The books turn on one comparison. Video games render convincing worlds out of pure information, and The Simulation Hypothesis asks whether our own world is doing something similar, a question that leads straight into the puzzles of quantum mechanics. That is…