Ask A Genius 1311: Emergent and Convergent Physics: Information, Redundancy, and the Universe
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/08
Rick Rosner: So, the principles of physics are both emergent and convergent. They appear as the universe emerges—coming from a state of low information, little matter, and minimal space. But the principles are in the same place every time, so they’re convergent. Unless, of course, the universe was precisely engineered from the outside to have different physics. Each possible universe converges on a standard physics. I like emergent and convergent because it rhymes.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is evolution also emergent and convergent?
Rosner: A hundred years ago, everything was more metaphysical. It was about trying to come up with reasons why things are the way they are—and getting many details wrong in the process. Everything was half-assed science because we didn’t have enough information. We hadn’t conducted enough scientific investigation to pin down many of the underlying mechanics of the universe.
Is phenomenology the right word for this? I don’t know. But the key issue is that, over the past five hundred years, our ability to describe “what happens” has massively outpaced our ability to explain “why it happens.”
We’ve become so successful at describing physical reality that the deeper “why” questions have been neglected. And because those questions sound more speculative, they’ve often been dismissed as hocus-pocus or pseudo-science. But we’ve now accumulated so much knowledge that we can take reasonable stabs at the “why” of things.
I said quantum mechanics gets us closer to the “why” because it’s a mathematical treatment of incomplete information and how it behaves. That points us toward a universe built from information—or at least deeply tied to information. That, in turn, suggests we should be more theorizing about what the physics of information would look like.
This goes against some of our traditional conservation laws—for instance, the idea that the total amount of information in the universe remains constant from the Big Bang to now. That’s a silly assumption. It makes much more sense to theorize about how information is actively created as the universe unfolds and how information can be lost as parts of the universe collapse.
That kind of theorizing should bring us closer to understanding the “why” of things. The idea that the universe defines itself—that you can have systems of increasing complexity and information—makes sense if you start with the idea that particles define each other through their history of interaction. If those interactions create a pocket of self-consistency, then the system persists.
So, if you start from self-consistency as a fundamental principle—meaning self-consistent things can exist because inconsistent things cannot—then you’ve already established the foundation for why physical reality works the way it does. And if you can successfully build a framework from that principle, then you’ve done science, not metaphysics.
Jacobsen: Does the universe build in redundancy to buffer against error?
Rosner: Our minds and brains are full of redundancy to protect against failure. If you go back to the thought experiment philosophers love to use, Jacobsen: When you perceive a red light, you’re not deciding it’s red based on a single photon hitting your eyes. You’re basing it on hundreds, maybe thousands of photons being processed by your brain after they hit the back of your eyeball.
Some thresholds need to be reached before you definitively recognize it as a red light. We’ve all experienced borderline sensory phenomena—situations where we’re uncertain of what we’re experiencing because we haven’t received enough sensory data. Whether it’s not enough photons, sound waves, or other stimuli, sometimes the brain fills in the gaps to compensate.
That’s why we sometimes see ghosts in the corner of a doorway—for a split second. Our brain interprets an ambiguous shape as a person because it’s safer to assume someone is there and be wrong than to miss an actual lurker who could pose a threat.
Well, at the quantum level, there’s no redundancy. Quantum events happen once, and that’s it—unless you set up a physics experiment to measure them in a way that records the results. The universe doesn’t naturally repeat quantum-level events to confirm what happened.
But if the universe is an information processor, then the information it generates is likely not based on single quantum events. Instead, it would be built from billions or trillions of overlapping quantum events, forming durable patterns.
We’ve talked about transient quantum events—like those happening inside stars, where no permanent record is kept. But durable events that shape reality happen on the super-macro scale—where 10³⁰, 10⁵⁰, or even 10⁷⁰ particles combine into a planet, a star, or some other massive structure.
The macroscopic scale itself acts as a form of redundancy.
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