Ask A Genius 1307: Do Fundamental Particles and Forces Arise from Underlying Informational Processes?

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/05

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Does the part of what is enforced in the Standard Model emerge from underlying informational processes? Are they the informational processes themselves as well? 

Rick Rosner: Numbers arise from underlying principles, and I assume that physical laws arise from underlying principles, too, where everything goes back to consistency and non-contradiction because you can’t have something that exists if it is fundamentally contradictory.

We’ve discussed the fundamental particles that make up the universe’s building blocks: quarks, leptons, gauge bosons, and the Higgs boson. The most relevant particles at the macroscopic level include protons and neutrons (which are made of quarks), electrons, photons, and neutrinos.

Someone more specialized in particle physics than I might argue for other particles’ importance. The strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism involve additional bosons like gluons and W and Z bosons. These particles are necessary, but we observe the macroscopic world largely mediated by quarks (which form protons and neutrons), electrons, photons, and neutrinos.

The rest of the Standard Model particles provide the underlying structure that governs fundamental interactions. They fit together in an elegant, mathematically consistent framework, often described using group theory. The particle spectrum of the Standard Model is the simplest set of particles and interactions that allows for a universe like ours to exist.

Our universe’s physical constants emerge from the relationships between particles, the scale of forces, and the overall structure of space-time. The values of these constants—such as the fine-structure constant, the gravitational constant, and the masses of fundamental particles—are determined by the universe’s symmetries and dynamics.

In principle, we can imagine alternative “toy” universes with different configurations of physical laws, but most would be inhospitable to life or unable to form complex structures like atoms and molecules. Despite its unresolved issues (like the nature of dark matter and quantum gravity), the Standard Model provides a framework that supports a rich and dynamic universe.

This ties into the anthropic principle—the idea that of all possible sets of physical laws, we observe the one that permits the existence of observers like us. If different universes could exist with different physical constants, we would only find ourselves in one where stable structures, chemistry, and life can emerge. However, we do not yet have experimental evidence for a multiverse, so this remains speculative.

People argue that life as we know it depends on water because of its unique properties: it remains liquid in a wide range of temperatures, has high specific heat capacity, expands when it freezes (allowing ice to float and insulate bodies of water), and is an excellent solvent for biochemical reactions. Some hypothesize that alternative chemistries, such as ammonia-based life, could exist, but this is speculative.

Ultimately, the Standard Model describes the minimal set of fundamental particles and forces necessary for the kind of universe we observe. While theoretical physics explores extensions to the model—such as supersymmetry or extra dimensions—what we currently know suggests that our universe is structured in the simplest way that still allows for complexity.

We only have one universe, so it’s a weaker probabilistic argument. However, you could strengthen the argument by understanding how the particles—the rules behind the set of particles we have—function, generating all possible conforming sets of particles. Doing so lets you determine whether ours is the simplest versatile assortment.

Jacobsen: Is there something akin to informational gravity if everything has an informational equivalent or derivative?

Rosner: Well, no. Gravity is the distribution of space based on where the information is. All else being equal, two universes with the same amount of information should have the same overall scale within reason.

Information arises from a universe that is, you know, “Big Bang.” But even in a pure Big Bang universe, information itself does not increase. In an information cosmology universe that expands from a Big Bang, information originates or is created as the universe differentiates, clumps up, and spreads out. However, information is still contained in the early universe’s expansion vectors.

Everything gets a vector early on, and those vectors quickly sort into an expanding universe. So, in theory, you could have a smaller universe in terms of radius, but the particles within it could have higher relative velocities because they haven’t been slowed down. Different scales are possible, but everything—

Anyway, that was a digression. However, given that two universes have similar apparent ages and amounts of information, they should have roughly the same scale and approximate radius. That radius should stay constant as long as the information remains constant—within reason.

You can trade radius for relative velocity. You could have a smaller universe with higher recession velocities, causing greater redshift. Or not. That might be something else. But, kind of. Anyway, you can imagine a range of different universes—same age, same amount of information—or the same universe at different moments but appearing to have the same age.

Jacobsen: Are you saying a universe could appear to have the same age for a long period?

Rosner: Right, say you’ve got an IC universe, and its apparent age remains constant for a trillion years. If its apparent age is 14 billion years for a trillion years, then taking snapshots of that universe at different points across that trillion-year period should have roughly the same radius in each snapshot.

Gravitation, which includes the macro curvature—the overall curvature of the universe—should allow you to rearrange matter via gravitational attraction and the reshaping of space depending on where the information is.

And I said yesterday that I’d have to remember what I was thinking about all this. But gravitation, in the most macro sense, is a pseudo-force that keeps the size of the universe the same.

You’re backdooring Einstein’s cosmological constant—the term he introduced into his general relativity equations to maintain a stable, non-expanding, non-contracting universe. He later called it his biggest mistake.

But you can get back to something like that by saying that the scale of the universe—its radius—depends on the amount of information it contains. You can rearrange matter within the universe, but the overall effect is that it doesn’t change in size.

Jacobsen: And gravitation is the force responsible for this?

Rosner: It’s probably mediated, at least partially, by the electromagnetic force and some other forces. But I should probably shut up because I won’t be clear until I think about it more.

Jacobsen: A long time ago, we used the term “operators” to describe things that jiggle around and interact in the universe. So, considering the kind of “woo” idea that consciousness has some fundamental properties influencing the foundations of reality—blah, blah—that can mostly be dismissed—emphasis on “mostly.”

But “operators” in a broader sense refer to categories of distinct things jiggling around, transferring forces, and exchanging vectors in the universe—particles, big collective filaments, and all kinds of interactions.

How would you fundamentally define operators’ properties in an informational sense? You gave an example a while ago—maybe not super long ago, but not recently—about hitting a rock and the force travelling through that rock, with all the particles within it imprinting information onto the universe, albeit temporarily.

Rosner: All right. That sort of thing. My thinking on that has changed a lot. Also, I haven’t thought about it that much lately because I’m a lazy fucker.

Jacobsen: More self-isolating than lazy.

Rosner: All right. Anyway, our awareness—our consciousness—our moment-to-moment qualia, plus ideas about the fucking qualia, plus memories, plus value, plus everything that constitutes consciousness, exists as a bunch of impressions. Some of them are fine-grained.

Like, I’m looking at a big-screen TV right now. And that, plus the room—my visual impressions—are very high-def. But there’s a bunch of stuff going on in my brain that I’m not aware of at the level it’s occurring—electrical pulses, dendritic connections strengthening, detaching, new ones forming.

So, a bunch of processing is happening that is more complex than the impressions I’m getting. I’m experiencing an image, a model of the world. But behind the scenes, there are a ton of switchboard operators plugging and unplugging connections to generate those impressions. That means there’s a bunch of concrete, fine-grained activity that I only perceive in a rough, blurred-out, aggregate way. I don’t see all the micro-businesses but get a macro impression.

If the universe is processing information, it doesn’t perceive a rock tumbling down a mountain on some random planet somewhere. It doesn’t “see” micro-events. It’s getting macro impressions.

The micro-scale events—what happens on planets, within stars—all that activity generates the macro impression. But the macro-level structure of the universe isn’t “aware” of the busy, detailed processes happening within it.

So that’s not a great answer, but it reflects—that I don’t know… if the model is to function and be believed. Then you need something like that. You can’t have a macro impression generator that is aware of all its little micro-processes. There needs to be some wobbliness in the system.

The universe is like clay instead of Minecraft. It’s mushy. You pull and shape it—it’s not a rigid digital environment where precise coding dictates every pixel.

Jacobsen: In a thermodynamic sense, what does entropy represent informationally? And what does information represent in contrast to that? By this, does an informational cosmology as an information conserving model imply the ‘opposites’ between information and entropy?

Rosner: So, and I always have a chance of fucking this up, but entropy—the higher the entropy, the more general the distribution of whatever you’re looking at to indicate information.

Like, you know, when we think about entropy, we think about heat. The most general and most probable heat distribution in a closed system is when everything is roughly the same temperature. That has the most possible states.

If you had a fixed amount of energy in a closed system, the most probable distribution of that energy would be one where every molecule has roughly the same temperature. If you looked at every possible state of the system, most would be high-entropy states—very general, very lukewarm.

And then, at the extreme, you’d have much rarer, low-entropy states—like one molecule holding all the energy while every other molecule has zero heat energy. That’s a very low-entropy state because it’s an incredibly specific, statistically improbable configuration.

Jacobsen: Right, that’s the standard thermodynamic definition.

Rosner: Did you ever grow up with those little plastic beads you put together on a board, then melt in the oven or iron to form a picture?

Jacobsen: No?

Rosner: If you have 12 different colours of those beads, the most general arrangement is when they’re all jumbled randomly in a bag—there’s no pattern, no picture, just randomness. That’s high entropy. But when you arrange the beads into a specific pattern that forms an image, that image contains information because it’s a precise and unlikely configuration. So, specific and rare configurations have more information and lower entropy than general, disordered states.

Jacobsen: For example, take a wedding cake that costs $1,200, decorated with intricate brocade and sugar roses. Now, compare that to someone eating the cake and then vomiting. The vomit—high entropy, low order. The cake—rare, unlikely to arise by chance, high information.

Something structured and aesthetically meaningful versus a chaotic mess. 

Jacobsen: I think we’re over time.

Rosner: Time to go.

Jacobsen: All right, thank you. Talk to you tomorrow.

Rosner: I appreciate it.

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