The radical idea that space-time remembers could upend cosmology
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2482841-the-radical-idea-that-space-time-remembers-could-upend-cosmology/
The radical idea that space-time remembers could upend cosmology
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2482841-the-radical-idea-that-space-time-remembers-could-upend-cosmology/
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> There are new hints that the fabric of space-time may be made of **”memory cells”** that record the whole history of the universe. If true, it could explain the nature of dark matter and much more
> According to general relativity, anything falling into a black hole crosses the event horizon and disappears from view. We also know that black holes evaporate exceedingly slowly into nothing – and this suggests that the information contained in anything that falls into them vanishes. Except, no: quantum theory insists information can’t be destroyed. We have a paradox.
> In 2024, my colleagues and I published a paper that describes what we call the imprint operator, a collection of mathematical functions that sets out how information can be imprinted in this way. We also showed theoretically that this mechanism **allows space-time to store the information that falls into a black hole.**
> If space-time truly has a memory-like structure, then it should be able to store information from any of the four fundamental forces of nature.
> The fact that QMM can handle all four fundamental forces offers encouragement that this idea might have some real insight. We aren’t postulating new hypothetical particles or unseen dimensions, we are simply taking what we already know about quantum information and packaging it in a new structure.
> We began by taking a qubit, the quantum equivalent of a computer bit, in a known starting state and letting it evolve over time. This evolution was designed to simulate the way a cell of space-time would be imprinted with information as quantum fields wash over it. The question was: **could our imprint operator accurately describe the qubit’s evolution?**
> To test this, we measured the state of the qubit after it had evolved and then applied a reverse version of the imprint operator to see if this would describe the original state. We found that it did indeed do so, with an accuracy of about 90 per cent. This wasn’t just a theoretical toy model. The imprint and retrieval protocols were grounded in QMM’s mathematical structure and translated directly into executable quantum circuits, validating the idea that memory-like behaviour **is physically modellable.**
I have to say, what a cliffhanger that last sentence becomes behind a paywall.
“In fact, I would go further. I have come to believe that space-time isn’t the kind of empty nothingness most of us think it is, but instead, at a fundamental level, it is made of stored information.”
It feels like this theory is in competition with Black Hole Complimentarianism, something that explains very well what happens to the information consumed by a black hole, and does so without proposing a new theory of space.
All of this could simply be the result of doing science inside a simulation. The construct is so sophisticated that we’ve evolved within it, invented tools, and are now discovering that the fundamental building blocks of what appears to be a physical reality aren’t particles of matter at all, but energy and information at their most granular level? This keeps getting reinforced in my brain lately. Also the thought that if thats true, we are most likely not the main “subject” of the simulation.
So it’s similar to LSD flashback mechanisms. Just forming loose analogy here. Oh baby.