Ancient philosophers were able to reach similar conclusions, even without the modern knowledge of the 'laws of the universe' we hold to be true today. In Descartes Second Meditation, Descartes raises the question as to what we can really know about the world. He considers that everything around us is just what we perceive it to be with our senses, and for all we truly know it could just be an illusion our senses are subjecting us to. Anything that can be doubted cannot be accepted as truth. This line of thought has also been expanded by scientists, and is reflected by the fact that all scientific knowledge can only be, at best, a "theory" waiting for that one time when something happens that would disprove what we think we know. We have built up quite an extensive knowledge base for how the world works, but it is all just theories stacked upon theories that all fit together in the end to form a logical reality. All it would take is one instance of an object being repelled by gravity, rather than attracted, to send it all crashing down. But I digress. Descartes holds that the only thing he can be sure of is "I," his own thought, stemming from the baseline concept "I think therefor I am." Everything else is just a reality constructed by the senses, and the senses can be deceived. Personally, I would take it one step further to say that you cannot trust yourself either, because one's 'self' is, from a scientific standpoint, an illusion created from all one's past experiences once given a way to think rationally.
This line of thought forms a nice parallel with the plot of The Truman Show, a movie in which the main character, Truman Burbank, is living a seemingly regular life, all the way from being a child to an adult, when he suddenly starts realizing that everything around him is being staged, and ultimately that his life has been made into a show, with everything he knows, including himself, having been set up by the show producers. As peculiar things start happening, Truman begins to doubt his long-held assumptions about his world, and the more he learns, the more he realizes that everything he thought he knew: friends, places, and 'truths', are nothing more than an illusion created to keep him content and within the show's boundaries. While The Truman Show is foremost an entertaining film, if you look a little below the surface it is a fantastic example of the philosophical thoughts of Descartes ideas in action. One of the merits of The Truman Show is that for everyone watching, they can place themselves in the main character's shoes. The main character is completely unknowing at first, and so it could just as easily be any one of us being featured in the show, and much like our 'theory' of the world, there's no way to definitively prove that we're not, only the possibility that the illusion could come undone and find that our reality wasn't really real.
In the end, despite all the questions as to what the true nature of reality is, be it illusion or truth, it ultimately comes down to perspective. From the point of view of any one person, it is up to them to decide what their 'reality' is. If each person can only feel sure of their own existence, then there's just no way to uncover any more than that beyond the possibility of a doubt, at least with the senses we are given, and so it's ultimately up to each person to decide what their reality is. Truman may have been able to dissipate an illusion from his life, but should he have never discovered it, then his 'fake' reality may as well have been a normal existence. Similarly, even after breaking out of the show, Truman still remains in a questionable reality, and there's always the possibility to break out one step further, so philosophically he is in the same place at the end of the movie as he is at the start: in his perceived reality.
I think mentioning the beginning of Hume's work would be appropriate here as well; he discusses how cause and effect, while seeming to have to have a relationship between one another, may in fact just be the illusion of a pattern that we have yet to see a contradiction to. Much like how in Truman's world there is an illusion of businesses operating normally and interacting with the outside world, these businesses are in fact a facade and their apparent production of goods and services isn't actually stemming from commerce. Instead, an illusion of business is presented that to the outside viewer appears to be the result of predictable actions and reactions. In a similar fashion, Hume postulates that perhaps what we know as cause is merely an illusion that only seems to result from an associated effect.
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