One D Too Many
I was reading this week about a new view of the universe that some physicists are, oh, I don’t know, exploring? Debating? Imagining? Or maybe just using as a masturbation fantasy. But let me not be the first to cast stones here, lest God take me to task for any of my own private thoughts.
So this view comes from thinking too much about black holes and about the laws of the universe. One of those laws, and one that the physicists take very seriously, is that information can’t be destroyed. I’m not sure they mean the same thing by information that normal people do, but I’m not sure they don’t either. One of the other fundamentals of the universe is that nothing can come out of a black hole; after all, the inability of even light to come out is what gives black holes their name. So the thought then comes that if a thing falls into a black hole and can never come back out, is that not the same as that thing being destroyed? Thus a thing that falls into a black hole is truly destroyed, made to cease to exist, as opposed to being merely destroyed, where “mere” destruction really just changes the thing’s description. But that thing that was destroyed can be considered to consist in part of the information that describes it, but we “know” that information can’t be destroyed, so there must be some way that the thing can be destroyed but not its information, and that “way” is that some physicists now theorize that while the physical thing is destroyed, its information, its description, gets spread out upon the surface of the black hole.
And here again, let me caution that I’m not sure all of these terms are being used by the physicists in the usual way, and based on God’s pitiful efforts to try and help me understand this, I’m not sure that even he really knows what the terms mean to the physicists. So by “surface of the black hole” I think they mean the infinitely thin space just beyond the event horizon, the breaking point between what can be considered “inside” the event horizon and what can be considered “outside.” When they say “information” or “description” I think they mean “everything that is the thing except the thing itself,” but that’s far too close to the sound of one hand clapping for my tastes. Also let me caution that they didn’t actually use the term “infinitely thin” to describe this “surface,” that’s my somewhat poetic interpretation of what they did say; what they did say was that the surface is two dimensional.
At this point they’ve come up with the notion that anything in our three-dimensional reality can be described by two-dimensional information. Some of them then claim that from there it’s really not much of a leap to suggest that maybe the whole universe is really a hologram, by which they mean a three-dimensional projection of two-dimensional information. I think some of them are claiming only that it’s not that big of a leap to think that we’re living in a hologram, and that some of them are actually claiming that we really are living in a hologram.
At this point, even God agreed with me that serious recreational drugs were probably in order. I’m just not sure if the drugs are to help understand what the physicists are thinking or if they’re meant to help me forget the whole thing.
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