Ask A Genius 1310: Information, Physics, and Metaphysics, or Information and Physics with ‘Metaphysics’
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/08
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why do objects and operators in the universe break down into something unique—something that holds a stable property in the universe?
You look at one electron, and it’s the same as every other electron in the universe. You look at a photon, and it’s the same deal. So why? Why do fundamental particles remain indistinguishable while larger-scale objects mostly do as well?
For big objects, we can’t immediately tell what belongs to each category. We struggle to categorize what makes something a star, a black hole, a non-rotating black hole, or various types of black holes. What exactly distinguishes a brown dwarf from a white dwarf? These things are distinct—but why? They take a bit of time to categorize, but, with time, we find the relevant properties.
At the smallest scales, things are simpler—the fundamental building blocks are identical. But as you scale up, you find increasing complexity, with structures becoming more distinct as they accumulate properties. However, even at large scales, stability emerges—suggesting that certain formations persist due to their information content.
Rick Rosner: So, we have cause and effect, but we can’t explain structure purely by invoking cause and effect. Systems don’t just accumulate mass—they accumulate information. And systems that model reality accumulate information efficiently. The only way to do this is to transition from low to higher-information states. This implies stable clumping, meaning homogeneous distributions don’t stay homogeneous. Instead, they clump heterogeneously. And when clumping up, gravitational energy is released.
As gravitational potential converts to kinetic energy, matter collapses into denser structures. This process releases heat as radiation, which dissipates across the universe. You can’t easily get that radiation back under normal conditions once that radiation is gone. The only way to recover that energy would be through collapsing cosmic regions—but in an expanding universe, those circumstances don’t arise naturally. So, once clumping occurs, it’s largely irreversible—and information is embedded in it.
Jacobsen: Can informational cosmology make any predictions for physics or particle physics experiments? I mean facility like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?
Rosner: Yes, but nothing immediately comes to mind because most disagreements I see with conventional physics occur at the largest cosmic scales—not at the subatomic level.
Jacobsen: So, you’re saying information is generated at the largest scales?
Rosner: Conservation laws apply locally and even at great distances, but at super-macro scales, things behave differently. So, no, I don’t think the LHC could easily test this. A better physicist could develop an experiment, but nothing jumps out at me.
But you can test the IC model against the universe’s age by looking for objects that appear older than 14 billion years—the estimated age of the universe. A few candidates might qualify, but they’re hard to detect and barely interact because they’re so old and energy-depleted. They’ve burned off nearly all their radiation, so they don’t emit much light. They’ve also settled into stable orbits because, over time, the likelihood of collisions changes—I don’t know the exact mathematical curve for collision probability over time, but it probably drops exponentially.
Over billions of years, chaotic interactions settle down. Objects can’t crash into each other indefinitely—eventually, everything gets its vector, and any object that is going to collide has already collided and bounced off or stuck together. So, after 12 or 14 billion years, something like a brown dwarf, neutron star, or burned-out planet could have drifted into a stable orbit, far from the galactic center, with nothing left to run into. Space is vast enough that these ancient objects could exist in isolation.
But we can still look for them. Yes, we can search for galaxies that appear too mature, too early—fully formed and actively producing starlight way too soon after the Big Bang. Though I don’t know if those are legit candidates, I’m unsure. But I know that the smaller, burned-out stellar remnants are good candidates for testing whether some things predate the known universe.
Also, we’ve talked about gold. Gold is hard to make. You need either a supernova or a collision of neutron stars to generate the extreme pressures and energies needed to fuse heavy nuclei. Gold cannot form inside a normal star—the heaviest element you can synthesize in a stellar core is iron.
Some researchers have suggested that there’s way too much gold in the universe to be accounted for by the processes we know. Not an absurd amount—it’s still rare—but if there’s twice as much as our current models predict, that would imply that gold-producing processes have been at work for longer than the universe should have existed.
Jacobsen: Famously, Gödel developed the incompleteness theorems. Various logical paradoxes appear unresolved. How does an information-based view of physics help resolve paradoxes?
Rosner: Many paradoxes—especially in mathematics and logic—are semantic. The incompleteness theorem states that any sufficiently complex logic system contains truths that cannot be proven within that system.
But let’s say this: If the principles of existence are emergent—rather than the product of a tightly woven, perfectly self-contained metaphysical structure—then some inconsistencies or paradoxes are allowed to exist at the edges.
As long as objects in quantum mechanics remain fuzzy—meaning their existence is not fixed but reinforced by their history and being part of a macroscopic system—then we shouldn’t expect perfect consistency everywhere. If existence itself is emergent and only mostly non-contradictory, then there’s room for some fuzziness, some apparent paradoxes at the boundaries.
If the rules aren’t ironclad metaphysical pillars that precede existence, then you can’t resolve everything. But if the principles of existence are emergent—forming alongside universes themselves—then yes, you can have paradoxes, incompleteness, and unresolved contradictions because the rules of existence aren’t absolute barriers that preclude everything.
And even saying that sounds like bullshit because you’re effectively arguing that the rules against existence preclude all existence, yet those rules exist. How the fuck can that be? If the rules preclude everything, but those rules themselves exist, then you’ve already got a paradox built into the system.
Jacobsen: You’re arguing that you can’t have rules against existence that preclude everything while also having those rules exist. You’re talking about rules of existence existing before there’s an explicit representation of those rules—whether that representation is through language, mathematics, or perception.
Rosner: The metaphysical structure of existence is not so rigid that it requires an explicit, pre-existing framework. It’s easier to have a universe exist than to get a camel through the eye of a needle or a rich man into heaven.
Jacobsen: When you break metaphysics down, it starts sounding more and more like extended physical law.
Rosner: Yes. Well, it has to be.
Jacobsen: It’s the type of law that gets discussed at a certain stage of knowledge.
Rosner: Metaphysics—an extension of certain types of physical law—has been out of fashion for centuries because it was hard to do and not particularly successful compared to the empirical science we’ve been doing for 300 years.
Jacobsen: We can continue with metaphysics as just being physics.
Rosner: Yes, exactly.
Jacobsen: So, we need to remove metaphysics altogether.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: That would be good. Because it makes things more scientific. Physics is the delineation of actual principles of existence as we discover them, what people call “metaphysics” is just physical law extrapolated from current understandings, which means metaphysics is, ultimately, a doomed enterprise to be replaced by precision in physics rather than its vagaries in ‘metaphysics.’
Rosner: That I buy.
Jacobsen: All right. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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