Ask A Genius 1499: Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes, and the Beauty of Physics
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/20
Rick Rosner highlights quantum mechanics as the most “neat” physics discovery, still awe-inspiring a century later. He explains the double-slit experiment, where photons interfere with themselves, revealing how reality behaves under uncertainty. This shows physics as the mathematics of incomplete information, defying classical assumptions. Beyond quantum theory, Rosner speculates that the scale of space itself changes inside supermassive black holes, potentially preventing singularities. He suggests that advanced civilizations might exploit these conditions, where constants like the speed of light could shift. For Rosner, both quantum experiments and cosmic extremes demonstrate how information may fundamentally define the universe.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is a physics phenomenon that, when you first learned about it, you thought, “That is pretty neat,” and you still think so today?
Rick Rosner: You cannot beat quantum mechanics for that. It has a weird reputation. When it was first developed—mainly in the 1920s—it seemed bizarre to classical physicists. Planck started it off with blackbody radiation around 1900. Then people developed the mathematics, the matrices, to characterize it, and started exploring its implications.
It was so strange that quantum mechanics got a reputation for being incomprehensible. Feynman even said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you do not.” That paradoxical reputation stuck.
However, now we have had it for a century, and physicists are at home with it. It has lost some of its aura of mystery, but it still gives significant clues about how the universe works—not teleologically, but structurally.
The cliché example is Schrödinger’s cat, which has been used in countless shows and movies, trying to seem deep. However, if you want one experiment that shows off quantum mechanics, it is the multi-slit experiment. Usually, it is presented as the double-slit experiment. Shine light on a plate with two holes, and the light going through will interfere with itself. You still get an interference pattern even if you shoot photons one at a time. That means each photon travels through both holes, as long as you are not measuring which hole it goes through.
If the universe does not know which hole the photon went through, then it went through all the holes. Moreover, that holds no matter how many holes you put in the sheet. If you put 58 holes in your plate and they are reasonably close together—like a shotgun blast—you can fire one photon at a time, and each single photon will effectively travel through all of the holes and eventually create an interference pattern.
Of course, you need to fire thousands of photons to build up a bright interference pattern, because each photon only lands once. However, the detector behind the plate maps exactly where each photon lands. Over time, the points build into a pattern that shows each photon interfered with itself.
That is a beautiful demonstration that quantum mechanics is the mathematics of incomplete information. It illustrates how reality behaves when you cannot perfectly characterize every particle at every moment if you don’t measure which hole the photon passes through, neither you nor the universe knows, so it passes through all of them.
If you try to stipulate afterward which hole each photon took, you are adding information that was never there. The pattern you predict that way would not match the interference pattern that appears. So, it is not dazzling exactly, but it is incredibly helpful—it reveals how the universe works under uncertainty.
Moreover, if you want a fun classroom demo: take a beaker of glycerin, put in a drop of ink, swirl it until the ink spirals apart, then carefully swirl in the opposite direction—you can recombine the drop. That is fun for a high school chemistry class, but nothing compares to QM for being legitimately awesome.
Jacobsen: If you were to speculate about something outside of quantum mechanics, or anything quantum-related, what would it be?
Rosner: I would guess that the scale of space itself changes radically near—or inside—the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. The extreme concentration of matter could make space “tighter.” That might even be attractive for super-advanced civilizations, as they could accomplish more in less time.
I would have to think it through again, but it would be dazzling if constants of physics—like the speed of light, or the scale of space—shifted in such extreme conditions. General relativity already includes some of this, but I think a more developed information-based theory of the universe would differ from relativity at those limits.
I have been saying for years that black holes do not collapse to an actual singularity. You get enormous gravitational self-attraction, brutally strong, but not infinite. Not just because of quantum uncertainty, but because the very scale of space changes, which puts a limit on how close matter can compress inside a black hole. That, to me, would be dazzling—and an indicator of how information defines the universe.
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