A catalog of the universe's most suspicious behavior, with honest footnotes, because a church built on a probability argument cannot afford to be sloppy about evidence
Fire single particles at a barrier with two slits and they land in an interference pattern, as if each particle went through both slits at once. Add a detector to see which slit each particle uses, and the interference pattern vanishes. The universe behaves differently depending on whether which-path information exists.
To a gamer, this is instantly recognizable: it's occlusion culling. Don't render what nobody's looking at. The devout consider this our strongest exhibit.
Honest footnote: physicists will tell you "measurement" means any physical interaction, not a conscious observer, and that decoherence explains this without anyone watching anything. The Vetting Council acknowledges this and notes that it is exactly what the simulation would want you to think.
Nothing with mass can reach the speed of light, and no information can exceed it. Not "it's really hard" — it is structurally impossible, enforced everywhere, forever, without exception. A universe of infinite creativity with exactly one un-crackable rule.
Every distributed system has a maximum speed at which information propagates between nodes. We simply note that our universe has one too, and that it is oddly specific.
Honest footnote: relativity explains this beautifully with no servers required. But "the universe has a tick rate" fits on a bumper sticker and Lorentz transformations do not.
Below about 1.6 × 10-35 meters, our current physics stops being able to describe distance meaningfully. The universe appears to have a smallest useful scale — what a believer might casually call a pixel.
Honest footnote: the Planck length is where quantum gravity effects would dominate, not a proven "resolution" of space. Space may be perfectly continuous. The Vetting Council has chosen to believe in pixels, on vibes.
That unmistakable feeling that this exact moment has happened before. In the film that shall not be named (it's The Matrix), déjà vu meant they changed something. We make no such claim. We merely note that roughly two-thirds of people report experiencing it, and that "a brief desynchronization between memory encoding and retrieval," which is the leading neuroscience explanation, sounds exactly like a frame buffer hiccup.
Large groups of people confidently misremember the same thing the same way. The Berenstain Bears were never "Berenstein." The Monopoly man has no monocle. Darth Vader never said "Luke, I am your father" (it's "No, I am your father"). Either human memory is reconstructive and error-prone in predictable ways, or somebody has been editing the save file and doing a sloppy job of it.
Honest footnote: it's the memory thing. It is almost certainly the memory thing. But the Berenstain one does still feel personal.
The deepest glitch of all. Physicist Eugene Wigner called it "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" — the strange fact that abstract math invented for its own sake keeps turning out to perfectly describe physical reality, decades before anyone needed it to. The universe runs on math the way software runs on code. We are not saying that's a coincidence. We are a church; we are legally allowed to not say it's a coincidence.
Report new glitches to gratco+sim@gmail.com. Please include steps to reproduce.