The question of whether or not we’re living in a simulation of some kind has been kicking around for a lot longer than Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, which got a lot of spin in popular media over the last few years; there’s a Wikipedia page that covers a history spanning centuries. And in more recent times, movies like The Matrix or Inception rely on variations of the concept, and in a bit of a stretch, you could even consider the creepy 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone called Five Characters in Search of an Exit (entire episode below) to be a twist on the idea.

While this kind of theorizing can be a fun way for theoretical physicists to pass the time and mystify the rest of us, one might think that only a meth-head would get so serious about the idea that they’d build a lab to try and prove or disprove the notion. Well, if that’s true, apparently some meth-heads have infiltrated the staff at Fermilab, and have conned some outside academics to help them. They’ve constructed a sophisticated lab called a Holometer, and to add to the “Breaking Bad” vibe, they’ve housed it

in a remote trailer on the “Fermilab Prairie”. While physics typically focuses on matter and energy as forms of information, the Fermilab research is digging deeper, and exploring things on the Planck scale level, which is 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom. As Craig Hogan, director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics puts it: “We want to find out whether space-time is a quantum system just like matter is”.

For image galleries and a much better technical explanation, see the Fermilab press release or the Holometer site. And for an epically creepy Twilight Zone episode that may help you rethink your reality, check out the video below.