Born to do Math 150 – Humongous, Titanic
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How are large-scale structures in the universe providing an image of the informational content and structure of the universe?
Rosner: To take a wider view, whatever model of whatever is going on in the universe informationally has to have enough information in it to be reasonable, for instance, it makes sense that there are roughly 10^11th galaxies in the universe.
They are not exactly evenly spaced, but they’re distributed throughout the universe in such a way that the universe is roughly not misshapen. The universe is curved spacetime. You can consider, for the purposes of relativistic math, the curvature of space as an additional dimension.
So that, the universe is the surface of a 4-dimensional sphere without being weirdly convoluted. So, given the shape of space is roughly, according to General Relativity, in part determined by the matter within it, the galaxies are regularly enough distributed that space is fairly smoothly shaped.
Given that, it makes sense to think of galaxies as, potentially, units of some type of information or units of some type of information processing within the overall information processor that is the universe. They’re huge structures.
There are a lot of them, 10^11th. That’s just the ones that are, according to IC, active versus ones that might be hidden at the outskirts of the universe and not shining at this point, not full of stars that are actively undergoing fusion and emitting light.
So, one place that there might be information is which galaxies are on. Let’s assume that in the universe, one galaxy in 2,000 active. Then there’s information in the choice of galaxies that are lit up, which then the information simply in the choice of galaxies – the number of potential combinations of 1/2,000th of 2,000*10^11th galaxies being selected is 2,000^10^11th/10^11th!.
In terms of the number of zeroes in the number, you can ignore the 10^11th factorial. It doesn’t make much of a dent in that humongous number, which, for the sake of quick math, make it 1 in 1,000 galaxies turned on.
That would 10^3rd to the 10^11th power, which would be a 1 followed by 3*10^11th zeroes. It would be divided by the factorial, which is negligible because you’ve got 300 billion zeroes after the 1 in your number. That’s the information content just in the choice of galaxies that are turned on.
That number, of course, would be less because galaxies would be correlated. If galaxy a is turned on, then it’s highly likely that galaxy b 100 lightyears away is also turned on. They’re local or connected via being a short distance from one another.
But it makes sense that there is information in the choice of galaxies that are turned on. I have gone back and forth about whether under IC the universe is super old with galaxies going through their natural lifespans of 20 or 30 billion years and then falling back away, so that you’ve got a rotating roster of galaxies.
More recently, it was like, “Wait, there are things going on, like apps within information processing that might require some galaxies to be perpetually on.” Now, I’ve gone back to the former view of a sort of rotating roster.
Given that the information capacity of just the choice of which galaxies to turn on is titanic, the information is in the combination rather than in the individual galaxies. Even though, the galaxies function as non-individual entities.
The mechanism for turning on the galaxies, as we were talking about last night, is probably a flood of neutrinos generated by the active center of the galaxy. So, there’s a thing called Bell’s Theorem in Quantum Mechanics about not having a hidden variable.
Some of this comes from Einstein and other people in the early days of Quantum Mechanics and being annoyed that some things in Quantum Mechanics being purely indeterminate. When a quantum wave function says, “What happens next can’t be decided and is instead a probability function.”
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