Physics is in kind of a mess these days. Scientists do have a detailed mathematical knowledge of how things work but physically no one has a clue why things are the way they are. Quantum physics does a good job of describing things at the atomic level and Relativity covers the big stuff, out to the galaxys. But these solid and exhaustively proven theories tend to contradict each other. String theory, which was promised as a solution, seems to be going nowhere and there have been several significant and mysterious discoveries in recent years that are challenging basic assumptions about the universe .

Along comes Brian Whitworth with an unnerving theory that seems, at least on it's surface, to address many of the existing mysteries. That's the good news. The bad news is that his theory is that our universe is a computer simulation and ours is a virtual reality. Here's a link to his paper. It's 14 pages and digestible for non scientists.