Information Paradox Abstract Theory

[bsimecek]

I am not an expert in physics, but I am an astute spectator of the reoccurring systems around me. After watching quite a few

 

documentaries surrounding Stephen Hawking, I have been honing in on an idea that I have had for quite some time.

 

I suggest that our universe is made up of infinitesimal parts. Black holes break down our known universe (dimension,

 

gravity, time...) into these smallest of parts and translate them into the Big Bang beginning of another universe. I would

 

translate this to one universe giving birth to another. This would be like a mothers' body breaking down everything she

 

ingests in order for the fetus's body to be able to create something new with it. The new universe will contain many of the

 

characteristics of the mother, but will be unique (basic properties of gravity, time, etc...) and on its own.

 

In a conference a few years ago, Hawking had tried to settle the "information paradox" by essentially saying saying that

 

there are universes without black holes and therefore information is preserved. I believe this is like saying there are

 

(universes) children without the ability to conceive (dead end universes).

 

My question is if there has been any other views of black hole theory that preserve this type of system or not? Any thoughts?

[Martin]

My question is if there has been any other views of black hole theory that preserve this type of system or not? ...

 

Sure, a whole book was written about the idea, and how we might detect signs of it having happened and thus get some observational evidence to back it up.

 

The book is called The Life of the Cosmos, by Lee Smolin. Look it up on web, if you want.

 

The extra idea he put in, that you may not have thought of, is evolution. Each time a black hole buds off a new expanding region,

the daughter can be just slightly different from the mother. The difference would be that some of the physical constants, the proportions in the laws of physics, might be slightly different. Slightly different masses of particles, slightly different strength of electromagnetic force, etc.

 

The daughter region might thereby be more able to produce black holes (and have more offspring) or less able, and have less offspring.

 

This would lead to natural selection favoring "reproductive fitness" and a population that had physical constants fine-tuned to make lots of stars, especially stars able to collapse to form black holes etc.

 

So we can ask if the fundamental physics constants are well-adapted to star-formation, etc. or are they not. It turns out that several of the basic constants have an effect on the rate of star-formation and black hole production. So there are good prospects for testing the idea.

 

The whole idea is sometimes called Cosmological Natural Selection or CNS, and there is an empirically testable CNS conjecture.

 

The book, Life of the Cosmos, came out in 1999. A more recent paper on CNS was

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0612185

The status of cosmological natural selection

Lee Smolin

25 pages

(Submitted on 18 Dec 2006)

"The problem of making predictions from theories that have landscapes of possible low energy parameters is reviewed. Conditions for such a theory to yield falsifiable predictions for doable experiments are given. It is shown that the hypothesis of cosmological natural selection satisfies these conditions, thus showing that it is possible to continue to do physics on a landscape without invoking the anthropic principle. In particular, this is true whether or not the ensemble of universes generated by black holes bouncing is a sub-ensemble of a larger ensemble that might be generated by a random process such as eternal inflation.

A recent criticism of cosmological natural selection made by Vilenkin in hep-th/0610051 is discussed. It is shown to rely on assumptions about both the infrared and ultraviolet behavior of quantum gravity that are very unlikely to be true."

 

This is probably more technical than you want. But it is free for download, while the book takes a trip to the public library or ordering from amazon.

 

There will be a chapter devoted to CNS in a new book coming out later this year, called Beyond the Big Bang: Prospects for an Eternal Universe, edited by R. Vaas. If you are interested, keep asking about it now and then and some more free online stuff will probably turn up.

Edited April 1, 2009 by Martin

[lakmilis]

Also.. although it is kind of a digression.. a colleague/friend of mine is a computer scientist and is part of a group working with a partial metric (the notion of the self distance of a point might be non-zero) and of course as a comp. scientist looks into the continuum* being discrete. (At first it has little to dow with what you say, but in the end he and I, could relate some of our metaphysical and/or mathematical hypothesis'together). Anyway, sorry, this is a jump which is not directly related and takes a little bit of gobbling to do to see why I mentioned it.

[bsimecek]

Excellent reply Martin!

 

Has any of the major physics guru's ever publicly accepted CNS or even hinted at it's acceptance?

[Martin]

Excellent reply Martin!

 

Has any of the major physics guru's ever publicly accepted CNS or even hinted at it's acceptance?

 

The answer is no! (one or two perhaps, almost none), but you have to be careful with the concept of "major physics guru".

For example, some people think of Stephen Hawking as a major figure.

He is major in the media, and he was major in research back in the 1980s.

 

Here's how to do a preliminary rough spot check on someone's standing in the research community. See if they have written any highly cited papers in the past 5 or 10 years.

 

Citations measure how interesting the other experts think someone's research is. If it makes valuable progress they will cite it in their own papers as a reference, and build on it.

 

Here is how to do that for Hawking.

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+A+HAWKING+AND+DATE+%3E+2005&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

You will see 5 papers and the most cited one got 18 cites, the rest got 10 or less.

 

Change the name to Ashtekar. You can do that manually, just backspace over Hawking and type Ashtekar, then click search.

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+A+ASHTEKAR+AND+DATE+%3E+2005&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

 

You will get 22 papers with several citation counts in the 100s.

 

Explanation: the letter A after the word "Find" stands for Author. The search engine looks for scholarly research papers by that author, and it sorts them by citation count (assuming you have selected that type of sort.)

 

================================

 

Another concept to be careful with is "acceptance". The author of a scientific theory himself does not necessarily accept it. He puts a conjecture out there under the spotlight to be tested. It might be something he would like to see observation or experiment rule it out! The important thing is that it be interesting---there should be consequences whether it is true or false---and that it be testable. A theory is not necessarily a pet, not for everybody anyway. It's a step along the way.

 

Hans Bethe was a Nobel laureate who I guess qualified as a guru in various senses. He collaborated on several neutron star papers that helped to get settled on ways to test CNS. At least he was that interested. George Ellis co-authored with Hawking around 1970s and has stayed productive. He has shown considerable interest in CNS, written positive things about it. A recognized top authority on cosmology, but on the old side. Lee Smolin might be considered a physics guru in his own right. He seems to have a lively interest in CNS. I would not imagine that he believes it, though. Theories are meant to be tested, and used to make predictions.

Edited April 2, 2009 by Martin