A Theory About the Universe

[ckriley]

I'm a huge geek for space and always watch YouTube videos about the universe, new discoveries, its exploration, how it works, etc. And my favorite thing about space is black holes. They are so freaking interesting to me.

Black holes are controversial for a number of reasons, chief among them is what it does to matter once it enters them. The truth is, physicists don't know what happens inside a black hole, they just have a bunch of theories based on some of the evidence they've gathered and their equations. But what is known is that spacetime itself becomes garbled, and it reaches the limit of human understanding.

This got me thinking. What if the purpose of the universe is simply to hold information. That's it. Every star, every planet, every moon, every galaxy, every gas, every object and structure, all the dust and rock, all the radiation - everything, is the information of the universe. The information of existence. Scientists do actually call all that stuff information, by the way.

As the universe expands, that information will last forever. Billions of years after our sun burns out, its light will continue traveling across the cosmos for quite literally forever (unless it's sucked into a black hole). Just as light from other stars and events that happened billions of years ago are just now reaching us.

This is the primary reason black holes are so controversial. The black hole information paradox. Science says that complete information about a physical system at one point in time should determine its state at any other time. But calculations suggest that information inside a black hole could permanently disappear, which violates all kinds of laws. Because information must always be preserved.

Soooo...is the universe just one big information depository? Kind of like an infinitely large hard drive?

 

[Satinavian]

The black holes are not the problem. Quantum mechanics is.

You see, information is directly linked to entropy, The statistical interpretation of entropy is basically the (negative) logarithm of the quotient of retrievable information to maximum information in a system. Black holes have entropy too. For them it measures (roughly), how much information outside of black hole mass is in the black hole. Black holes don't really violate ny of the laws regarding entropy and thus information.

But Quantum mechanics introduces fundamental uncertainty. And decoherence. Depending on which interpretation of quantum mechanics you actually use, that means loss of information.


Determinism is so 19th century.

 

[ckriley]

The black holes are not the problem. Quantum mechanics is.

You see, information is directly linked to entropy, The statistical interpretation of entropy is basically the (negative) logarithm of the quotient of retrievable information to maximum information in a system. Black holes have entropy too. For them it measures (roughly), how much information outside of black hole mass is in the black hole. Black holes don't really violate ny of the laws regarding entropy and thus information.

But Quantum mechanics introduces fundamental uncertainty. And decoherence. Depending on which interpretation of quantum mechanics you actually use, that means loss of information.


Determinism is so 19th century.

Honestly, thank you so much for your answer. I completely understand your last point about fundamental uncertainty, and how an interpretation of quantum mechanics could mean loss of information. That makes total sense to me. Black holes aren't really violating anything. We are. (That's how I see it.)

As for your point about maximum information in a system, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that called a wave function? Some of this stuff is way above my head, so sorry if that's a dumb question.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

Eh. To actually get anywhere we first have to decide what it means to have a purpose here. A purpose tends to imply that there was an intent when the thing was created. So barring a sudden addition of a creator to the universe then with this understanding of what it means to have a purpose, the universe cannot even have a purpose.

 

[Saelune]

Anything that breaks our laws of reality is probably just a clue that we dont understand enough about the laws of reality. I bet one day we will know all about black holes and what they do and all that. Dont know when, but one day people will look back and go "Wow, cant believe we used to think black holes _______"

 

[Pyrian]

FYI, it is theorized that the black hole information paradox can be solved by Hawking's radiation. It's really all very conjectural, but so is the information paradox itself, so... And the sad truth is that we may never get good hard data on the subject. Black holes are just a wee bit too... Black.