June 22nd, 2025
As I complained my previous essay on this topic, it seems that physicists are ahead of me; what I thought to be ridiculous speculations are in fact already being explored by genuine physicists. I won’t stand for that! If I can’t be a genuine physicist, the least I can do is run rampant through the morass of insane speculations. I’m going to take this even further into the wild blue yonder!
Let’s just suppose that I am correct in my speculation that information is the true substance of the universe. Electrons, protons, muons, neutrinos, and all that other stuff are mere manifestations of information. The information is the underlying reality, and somehow the bits of information are transformed into fundamental particles, which form nuclei, which form atoms, which form molecules, which form materials, which form ice cream sundaes. Or perhaps reality is some sort of information field, and the bits of information interact in ways that form all those fundamental particles. Hence, sometimes there’s an “ice cream sundae field interaction” which generates ice cream sundaes. Boy, anybody who finds that will really deserve a Nobel Prize.
Anyway, let’s think about singularities. These are generated by black holes a few nanoseconds (picoseconds? Femtoseconds? SupermicroUltrateensySeconds?) after they collapse. All their matter compresses into a tinier and tinier dot, for which we have no physics to guide our calculations. This liberates me to make up whatever physics I want. Fortunately, I don’t need to fabricate anything, because the Uncertainty Principle can guide us. Remember the energy-time expression of the Uncertainty Principle:
∆E ∆t ≥ h
The uncertainty in the energy of a given location multiplied by the amount of time we expend observing it MUST be greater than the Heisenberg Constant. Now, as the matter and energy inside the black hole compresses into a smaller and smaller dot, there must come a moment when its energy measured over an ever-shorter time interval must, together with that time interval, exceed Heisenberg’s Constant. The black hole violates the Uncertainty Principle!
My suggestion is that the Uncertainty Principle is not violated; when the singularity crosses that line into “Naughty-Naughty Land”, the Uncertainty Principle asserts itself. All that matter and all that energy “dissolve” back into their underlying information content. That stuff I will deferentially call “ylem”.
Now, when the singularity gets tiny enough, the Uncertainty Principle swings into action and, well, who knows what happens. This is my opportunity to say “…and then a miracle happens” and invoke any physical process I want. My speculation is that shrinkage has by now moving so rapidly that it, in effect, overshoot the limit imposed by the Uncertainty Principle, smashing far more ylem into a far tinier space than is “permissible”. At this point, two things happen:
First:, all that ylem generates a new universe with its very own Big Bang. All the information from the parent universe smashed into the singularity explodes out into a completely new universe.
Second: but wait, there’s more! I suspect that the time delay between the singularity getting too small and the Big Bang taking place allows that singularity to compress even more, and the greater the compression, the greater information content of the singularity. In other words, the process of compression creates information by putting more and more mass-energy into a more precisely definable location. That means that the amount of information contained in that singularity increases.
Now, this speculation on my part really blasts off into Cloud-Cuckoo Land. I’m claiming that a black hole, by concentrating mass-energy into an Uncertainty-Principle-defying location, generates new information. That new information manifests as ylem, which later condenses into mass-energy. The energy content of the new universe is greater than the energy content that went into the black hole.
I confess that I am almost certainly wrong about this. There are no free lunches and there certainly aren’t any free universes. But it does serve to give somewhat better justification for the size of our universe. After all, if my ravings be correct, then our universe is the child of the child of the child of… some initial universe, and we’d expect each child to be smaller than its parent universe. However, we could just as easily posit that the Mother of All Universes is infinitely large, so that its children could be very large, etc. etc., down to our own universe with its measly few billion galaxies.
So there you have it. Is this crazy enough for you physicists? I DARE you to concoct something this outlandish! With this essay, I re-assert my claim to the wildest, craziest, kookiest, most absurd proposal in cosmology. Take that, you genuine physicists!