Fumfer Physics 25: Quantum Limits, Black Holes

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/23

Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore informational cosmology at black-hole boundaries and beyond. Rosner notes supermassive black holes are densest from the outside, yet interior density is tempered by curved spacetime and quantum “fuzziness.” Quantum gravity candidates, exclusion principles, and phase transitions may halt true singularities, yielding ultra-dense, evolving quantum states. Stars act as leaky correlational engines; galaxies emit immense photon webs, but the most durable records likely reside in gravitational filaments. Rosner sketches “hedgehog” collapse vectors around t0, speculates galaxies can dim and relight via cosmic-web inflow, and doubts nucleation around neutron stars. Dark-matter halos endure. Conclusions remain provisional—and productively skeptical.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In informational cosmology—if we take a bubbly big-bang universe with regions forming and collapsing—you’ve got active regions and collapsed ones like black holes. What’s the densest possible agglomeration of collapsed matter that could theoretically approximate a black hole, but isn’t quite one?

Rick Rosner: From the outside, the densest objects would be the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies—some have billions of stellar masses. From an external perspective, those are the densest things in the universe.

Inside, though, they might not be as dense as we imagine, because the scale of space itself changes within that gravitational well. The curvature of spacetime dilates distances. From the outside, they’re almost as black as black can be—but internally, density and geometry behave differently.

Jacobsen: Do quantum effects at that limit—where you push matter so close together—change how we interpret these systems in an informational or cosmological framework?

Rosner: It depends which quantum effects you’re talking about. The key issue is that in combining quantum mechanics with general relativity, the forces involved—especially gravitational self-attraction—become stronger than any other force we know. Traditional relativity predicts a singularity, an infinity of density, but quantum mechanics might prevent that. Some models, like loop quantum gravity or string theory, suggest spacetime could resist true infinite collapse, replacing the singularity with a finite, ultra-dense quantum structure.

Matter does not exist in pinpoints—it exists with some quantum fuzziness. So even as you approach a singularity, you never truly reach one, because there’s always that fuzziness. You don’t hit infinity unless everything is compressed into a perfect mathematical point, which never happens.

Jacobsen: So that fuzziness is a kind of built-in safeguard against infinities?

Rosner: That’s one quantum correction to general relativity, which otherwise predicts mathematical infinities. And, as far as we know, there are no actual infinities in this or any universe. Before you even reach the singularity, you run into other quantum effects—things like the Pauli exclusion principle, which says you can’t have two particles with identical quantum states occupying the same space.

I’d have to reread the fine points of it, but it’s one of the strongest constraints in quantum mechanics. Basically, there are all sorts of physical “sticking points” that stop matter from collapsing smoothly into an infinite point.

As you add more energy—compressing matter like running the Big Bang in reverse—you reach energy levels so extreme that ordinary particles can’t exist under those conditions. At the Big Bang, for instance, in the first trillionths of a second, you had super high–energy particles like the Higgs boson because everything was compressed into a tiny volume with immense energy density. As the universe expanded, that energy dissipated, and those extreme particles disappeared, leaving behind the “normal” particles that obey familiar quantum rules.

When you’re building a singularity—or something close to it—you’re taking ordinary particles and crushing them together until they can’t exist side by side according to quantum mechanics. When that happens, the system shifts: you inject so much energy that those particles are replaced by higher-energy particles capable of existing under those conditions. You end up with a degenerate, smashed-down quantum soup. Add even more energy, and you get newer, higher-energy structures that aren’t bound by the same exclusion rules.

It becomes a hierarchy of phase transitions—each layer replacing the one before it.

Jacobsen: When you look at a star, a lot of photons get out, but some get trapped for potentially millions of years. The record of those photon directions and interactions gets scrambled long before the star explodes. But when the star finally does explode, all that matter and all those interactions that were in tight correlation get ejected. Quantum mechanically, are those ejected particles still entangled?

Rosner: At least according to information theory, everything that happens in the universe can be given an informational interpretation. So yes—in a sense, everything remains connected, though not in any way we could practically measure.

When a bunch of matter collapses into a dense wad, that has implications for the information embodied by that matter. This is a roundabout way of saying I don’t know exactly how any of this works—but yeah, when you take a stellar object and play with the gravitational curvature of the space around it, that curvature can allow some matter or radiation to escape into the larger universe. When that happens, the escaping material carries information from within the object. I don’t know the full rules governing that, but I’d assume it involves entanglement.

Entanglement is hard to produce in a lab, but in the universe as a whole, everything is effectively entangled—everything shares a history. I don’t know the detailed physics, but that shared history is part of it. When particles escape from a highly self-contained object, they carry a kind of record of that object’s state. So there’s an information release into the wider universe, which makes sense in a system that stores and, when conditions allow, retrieves information.

Jacobsen: Over a chapter of a star’s life cycle—say, a billion years—most of that process plays out gradually. A star’s matter and radiation remain in communication with the universe at large; it’s not self-contained the way a black hole is. The gravitational gradient in a star just isn’t strong enough to seal it off from the rest of spacetime.

Rosner: A star isn’t a black hole. It’s still embedded in the broader universe. It acts as a kind of correlational engine, not an isolated system. There’s a little self-containment due to fusion, but stars are terrible at maintaining a record of most of the interactions happening inside them.

Jacobsen: What about at the galactic level—say, ten to the eleventh stars in a single galaxy? That’s an immense photon web being emitted from all those stars over billions of years. I am thinking of it as a kind of long-term, galaxy-scale correlational photon network.

Rosner: I see what you mean—I’m not entirely convinced by that framing.

Jacobsen: But there’s definitely a lot of information encoded in the spatial and energetic map of the universe. 

Rosner: The distribution of photons, matter, and gravitational fields across the cosmos forms an immense record—one that’s constantly being written and rewritten by every interaction that’s ever taken place.

The shaping and association of large-scale structures in the universe are done through gravitation, including the galactic filaments—the vast, web-like formations that connect clusters of galaxies. Those filaments are durable. If my model of the informational cosmos is right, they probably persist far longer than the apparent age of the universe itself.

I haven’t thought deeply about the gravitational relationships among all the stars within a single galaxy, though. I don’t think that structure is as durable as what you find in the cosmic filaments. For example, the spiral arms of a galaxy aren’t permanent structures—they’re density waves that sweep around the galactic disk. Over ten million years or so, they change form. It’s like “the wave” at a football stadium: the pattern moves, but the people stay put.

Over time, stellar collisions decline—both within galaxies and solar systems. The objects that are going to collide do so early on, and what remains settles into relatively stable orbits.

So is there usable information in that long-term stability? In a galaxy that’s twelve billion years old compared to one that’s only a few hundred million years old and still forming, is there more informational value in the older structure?

I don’t know. My instinct is that there’s not a great deal of new information in that stability. 

Jacobsen: Nature is subtle, and your emphasis on durable structure—those immense galactic filaments—is probably where most of the long-term information resides. They’re the biggest identifiable structures in the universe, outside the universe itself, if such a thing could even be said to exist.

I’m probing different angles here. Maybe it’s not durability in volume, but durability in time—a sort of persistence through the immense photon web these galaxies emit over billions of years. That’s another kind of durability.

Rosner: Possibly. If my idea of the informational cosmos is right, galaxies can “run out of juice”—their star formation stops—and later they could light up again when the surrounding cosmic web sends enough energy or material back into them. I don’t know what’s truly durable about a galaxy in that context.

Jacobsen: What if some things are transitionally durable? Not permanent themselves, but stepping stones toward something that lasts longer—structures that serve as scaffolds for more durable cosmic phenomena.

Rosner: Maybe. I can imagine an old galaxy running out of energy, leaving behind collapsed remnants orbiting a supermassive black hole at its center. Occasionally, those remnants could still collide, losing orbital momentum due to gravitational friction. Even then, near that collapsed region—close to what we might call t₀, where everything’s extremely dense—time itself runs slower. Every galaxy carries its own intense gravitational vector, which tends to keep them from colliding with each other.

So the space around t₀ looks like a hedgehog, with the spines representing individual galaxies or clusters of galaxies—each with its own direction, its own gravitational collapse vector. It’s spiky that way. It’s not one uniform space but a collection of collapsed regions, separated by gravity—or by the lack of mutual gravitational influence. Everything’s got its own vector.

Within one of these collapse spikes, you’ve got a galaxy where time moves more slowly but isn’t completely frozen. There’s still a lot of collapsed material orbiting a supermassive black hole at the center. Then, eventually, that material lights up again. I assume that happens through some change in curvature that releases a lot of energy—probably mostly from the center, maybe also from other structures within the galaxy.

There must be ancient, collapsed matter orbiting far from the center that doesn’t get re-illuminated when a galaxy “relights.” I would think most of the release comes from the center. Does that process leave much of the galactic structure intact? And if it does, does that matter informationally? Are the objects that light up the old ones, or are they newly formed stars?

Maybe this whole model doesn’t work, because if you’ve got a galaxy full of burned-out remnants—neutron stars, brown dwarfs, collapsed material—and then it gets relit, there’s no evidence that each new star nucleates around a neutron star that pulls in new matter. That’s just not supported by observation.

What we do know is that galaxies have halos of dark matter—possibly regular, collapsed matter we can’t see—that explain why orbital speeds don’t drop off as expected with distance from the center. Maybe only the material far from the core survives both collapse and relighting. But I don’t know. All I’ve got are possibilities, and most of them sound dubious.

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