Dear Fellow Entities,
In the light of the current Covid-19 pandemic, everything seems to be falling apart. The apocalypse is practically upon us, leading the state of the world to appear increasingly surreal.... or not real. And my personal favorite means of coping? Deny all validity to the world, and proclaim that nothing is real. Life is a hologram. Boom. Bam. That's it… and I'll prove it. I'm sure all of your worlds are shattering around you, facing these abnormal new ways of life we are all learning to live and experience, so why not make it a total fuck all and deny all of your current perceptions of reality?
I'm going to assume you already know many things prior to reading this post. Among them, information, entropy, and the event horizon. Probably not a great means of teaching.
For those incapable of googling:
Information: the specific arrangement of particles... The difference between a diamond and coal is a result of information since both are only carbon. Our laws of physics also state that information CANNOT be deleted.
Entropy: lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. By our universe’s operation, reality moves to an ever-increasing state of disarray. Entropy always increases. Our universe will always move towards chaos:)
Event Horizon: the boundary defining the region of space around a black hole from which nothing (not even light) can escape. Or so we thought.
(Also consider reading our other articles first to get an understanding of all things quantum and the fabric of space-time)
Jump In, Get Spaghettified
We begin with Black Hole Entropy. Caution, this might sound crazy. A black hole’s entropy represents the total quantum information of everything that has ever fallen into that black hole. The Bekenstein Bound is the maximum information (or entropy) quotient of any volume of space. What's crazy is, the amount of this information is determined by the surface area of the volume of space, not the volume itself. Weird right? We imagine that the information of an object would be a component of all its, well, stuff. It's volume. What we consider to be substance, not just the surface area of that object.
Let's talk about Hawking Radiation;) Have you heard of virtual particles? Empty space is actually quite active; even though it doesn’t look it, the dark abyss is quite busy. Pairs of virtual particles, matter and antimatter, spontaneously appear and annihilate each other by briefly borrowing energy from the vacuum of space itself. If you're wondering what antimatter is and why matter and antimatter destroy each other, it's time to make google your friend. When this quantum entanglement occurs near a black hole or just on the edge of its event horizon, one of the virtual pair can be s w a l l o w e d by the event horizon leaving the other free to escape - taking energy it stole from the black hole to fuel this reaction, inevitably decreasing the size of the black hole. The problem is, this release of particles radiating away the black hole’s mass radiates away the information with it, a paradox I will elaborate on shortly.
Black Holes aren’t Black. Just Black-ish
Hawking radiation occurs mostly with photons and other massless particles since to produce particles with mass the energy of the radiation has to be high enough to cover the rest mass of the particle (google it). The splitting of entangled matter and antimatter pairs though is just a heuristic interpretation. The actual cause of the splitting is difficult to pinpoint. It’s probably positive and negative frequency modes mixed due to scattering, could also be a symptom of the ever-elusive graviton, maybe it’s quantum tunneling, there are (finite but) immense deviations.
Almost all explanations are laced with the principle of quantum uncertainty. Yet, different deviations lead to the same result, and what matters is that black holes emit particles.
Nothing can escape the event horizon, not matter, not light, not even information.
Though the mathematics behind black holes is complex, they themselves are fairly simple. Black holes have three properties: mass, electric charge, and angular momentum. These are the only properties that should emerge beyond the event horizon by the No-Hair Conjecture. A graduate student got to name it, since he discovered it, and decided to name this theorem after the fact that black holes should have ‘no hairs’ (other than these three properties) and are fairly bald. That's physics for you.
Since nothing can escape the event horizon, the interior of a black hole is cut off from the rest of the universe. It is causally disconnected, meaning nothing beneath the event horizon can influence the rest of the universe. So! In effect we have no actual means to know what makes up the interior of a black hole, it could be a collapsed star, a wormhole into another universe, or a bunch of bananas.
As information or matter enters a black hole it adds to the blackhole's mass, but this mass can be radiated away, as we have learned, through hawking radiation. This is not exactly groovy, since this leak of particles could destroy information. The destruction of information defies our understanding of quantum mechanics, and basically how the universe operates all together.
But will I allow some bitch ass little particles to break our entire understanding of the universe AND our laws of physics? Maybe. But not just yet. I mean this is our entire understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. I like to think I'm open-minded, but come on man. So in my blissful ignorance, I've decided that life is a hologram. I'm not just saying it though, it's an actual possibility.
This fundamental part of physics I'm referring to is the law of conservation of quantum information: the foundations of quantum mechanics demand that quantum information be preserved forever. This information though does not have to be accessible to us. It simply has to exist somewhere. Information persists inside a black hole, we just can’t access it. So everything was fine and dandy before Hawking came along, even though we couldn’t access the information inside a black hole, it was still preserved within the black hole. But as a black hole radiates away its mass, this information radiates away with it. Quantum theory is NOT down with this. If we assume that general relativity and quantum mechanics are correct, then hawking radiation must exist and it must delete quantum information. Ain't life so paradoxical?
True paradoxes don't actually exist though, they are more a representation of our ignorance to the truth, or inability to discover it. A better understanding of physics (which we don’t yet have) would satisfy this alleged paradox. To dismantle this, there's a theory that the information which makes up every single thing that enters a black hole that becomes encoded on the event horizon, is then transferred to the hawking radiation itself as it radiates. Since time freezes at the event horizon, to an objective observer outside of the black hole, it should appear that the information never actually passes through the event horizon, therefore remaining imprinted upon the event horizon itself.
Stephen Hawking personally preferred a different theory... but it necessitates a parallel universe to ours, wormholes where information could pass through the singularity, and white holes to create new universes and parallel universes. All on the basis of rotating black holes. But just to spite this genius, and because this theory is now generally considered to be outlandish, I'm gonna focus on life being a hologram. Much more reasonable.
This wondrous holographic life is not without its faults though, there are two main problems to the theory:
ONE: there is no known mechanism by which infalling stuff could leave enough of an information imprint to affect Hawking radiation
TWO: if it did leave an imprint, it would break quantum mechanics as surely as the old information paradox
What? Our solution, meant to not break quantum mechanics, still breaks quantum mechanics? You see instead of being deleted, the information would be duplicated. The actual object or observer falling through the black hole would, from its perspective, appear to move straight through bringing its information with it, so the information that we perceive outside of the black hole imprinted on its event horizon, and later transferred onto hawking radiation, would imply twice the information which should be present. This violates the Quantum No-Cloning Theorem. I'd explain, but I think the name is pretty self-explanatory.
BUT because I'm not giving up on my holograms that easily, I plan to argue away this violation. The information can never be perceived by the same observer due to the difference of perspective, so it is not really duplicated. Plus, since time within the black hole and time beyond the event horizon are totally disconnected and incongruent, one could argue this ‘duplicate’ information does not even exist within the same time frame. Or at the same time. This idea is called black hole complementarity. It is another principle of uncertainty, similar to the position and momentum of a particle and other conjunctions. If you're interested in reading more about how deeply uncertain life is, check out my article against the existence of Peru. This is a duality of reality (i rhymed) in the same way a particle is a particle, but also a wave;) funky.
So we have denied problem number TWO, now let's discuss problem number ONE. Well, Information doesn't really freeze on the surface of the event horizon, in actuality it distorts the surface creating a sort of lump or bump. This distortion could affect hawking radiation as it passes through the event horizon, allowing the radiation to carry that information away with it.
This idea of distortion and carrying away information has some pretty wackadoo implications, we have found that the three-dimensional gravitational (and quantum mechanical) interior of a black hole can be f u l l y described by interactions on a two-dimensional surface which does not include gravity. THIS MEANS that the union of quantum mechanics AND gravity may require that the entire three-dimensional universe be a projection on a two-dimensional structure. This has been formalized in string theory as the holographic principle. Understanding black holes, could imply that the entire universe is a hologram.
In a more romantic description: all of us, the earth, the universe, you, and me, are simply two-dimension information trapped on the event horizon of a black hole. Waiting for protons, or some other massless particle, to project us into an artificially three-dimensional world. We are nothing more than three-dimension projections from the 2D surface. So, is reality insanely cool? Yes. Do we understand the nature of reality? Probably not. Does life, the universe, have any meaning? … Who's to say?
Our primitive brains like to cling to our understanding of reality. We hold that there are three dimensions of space, and one of time. We cling to this initial view even when physics shows us that our perception of reality is only a narrow slice of what actual reality could be.
Love and Rage,
Raina?
(not actually Raina just a hologram nothing to see here)
P.S. In my next article, I will discuss how we create a hologram from a lower dimension using invariability, and the implications of string theory. I would continue into these interesting concepts now, but physics is a rabbit hole. If I start discussing how string theory is used in this context, I'll start discussing string theory itself along with how to conceptualize higher dimensions. It is a wonderfully tangled web. I could go on, but quickly this unintimidated article will become a lengthy book.
Almost all explanations are laced with the principle of quantum uncertainty. Yet, different deviations lead to the same result, and what matters is that black holes emit particles.
The Paradox
Nothing can escape the event horizon, not matter, not light, not even information.
Though the mathematics behind black holes is complex, they themselves are fairly simple. Black holes have three properties: mass, electric charge, and angular momentum. These are the only properties that should emerge beyond the event horizon by the No-Hair Conjecture. A graduate student got to name it, since he discovered it, and decided to name this theorem after the fact that black holes should have ‘no hairs’ (other than these three properties) and are fairly bald. That's physics for you.
Since nothing can escape the event horizon, the interior of a black hole is cut off from the rest of the universe. It is causally disconnected, meaning nothing beneath the event horizon can influence the rest of the universe. So! In effect we have no actual means to know what makes up the interior of a black hole, it could be a collapsed star, a wormhole into another universe, or a bunch of bananas.
As information or matter enters a black hole it adds to the blackhole's mass, but this mass can be radiated away, as we have learned, through hawking radiation. This is not exactly groovy, since this leak of particles could destroy information. The destruction of information defies our understanding of quantum mechanics, and basically how the universe operates all together.
But will I allow some bitch ass little particles to break our entire understanding of the universe AND our laws of physics? Maybe. But not just yet. I mean this is our entire understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. I like to think I'm open-minded, but come on man. So in my blissful ignorance, I've decided that life is a hologram. I'm not just saying it though, it's an actual possibility.
This fundamental part of physics I'm referring to is the law of conservation of quantum information: the foundations of quantum mechanics demand that quantum information be preserved forever. This information though does not have to be accessible to us. It simply has to exist somewhere. Information persists inside a black hole, we just can’t access it. So everything was fine and dandy before Hawking came along, even though we couldn’t access the information inside a black hole, it was still preserved within the black hole. But as a black hole radiates away its mass, this information radiates away with it. Quantum theory is NOT down with this. If we assume that general relativity and quantum mechanics are correct, then hawking radiation must exist and it must delete quantum information. Ain't life so paradoxical?
True paradoxes don't actually exist though, they are more a representation of our ignorance to the truth, or inability to discover it. A better understanding of physics (which we don’t yet have) would satisfy this alleged paradox. To dismantle this, there's a theory that the information which makes up every single thing that enters a black hole that becomes encoded on the event horizon, is then transferred to the hawking radiation itself as it radiates. Since time freezes at the event horizon, to an objective observer outside of the black hole, it should appear that the information never actually passes through the event horizon, therefore remaining imprinted upon the event horizon itself.
Stephen Hawking personally preferred a different theory... but it necessitates a parallel universe to ours, wormholes where information could pass through the singularity, and white holes to create new universes and parallel universes. All on the basis of rotating black holes. But just to spite this genius, and because this theory is now generally considered to be outlandish, I'm gonna focus on life being a hologram. Much more reasonable.
This wondrous holographic life is not without its faults though, there are two main problems to the theory:
ONE: there is no known mechanism by which infalling stuff could leave enough of an information imprint to affect Hawking radiation
TWO: if it did leave an imprint, it would break quantum mechanics as surely as the old information paradox
What? Our solution, meant to not break quantum mechanics, still breaks quantum mechanics? You see instead of being deleted, the information would be duplicated. The actual object or observer falling through the black hole would, from its perspective, appear to move straight through bringing its information with it, so the information that we perceive outside of the black hole imprinted on its event horizon, and later transferred onto hawking radiation, would imply twice the information which should be present. This violates the Quantum No-Cloning Theorem. I'd explain, but I think the name is pretty self-explanatory.
BUT because I'm not giving up on my holograms that easily, I plan to argue away this violation. The information can never be perceived by the same observer due to the difference of perspective, so it is not really duplicated. Plus, since time within the black hole and time beyond the event horizon are totally disconnected and incongruent, one could argue this ‘duplicate’ information does not even exist within the same time frame. Or at the same time. This idea is called black hole complementarity. It is another principle of uncertainty, similar to the position and momentum of a particle and other conjunctions. If you're interested in reading more about how deeply uncertain life is, check out my article against the existence of Peru. This is a duality of reality (i rhymed) in the same way a particle is a particle, but also a wave;) funky.
So we have denied problem number TWO, now let's discuss problem number ONE. Well, Information doesn't really freeze on the surface of the event horizon, in actuality it distorts the surface creating a sort of lump or bump. This distortion could affect hawking radiation as it passes through the event horizon, allowing the radiation to carry that information away with it.
Life is a Hologram
AND THIS IS WHEN WE REALIZE LIFE IS A HOLOGRAM
This idea of distortion and carrying away information has some pretty wackadoo implications, we have found that the three-dimensional gravitational (and quantum mechanical) interior of a black hole can be f u l l y described by interactions on a two-dimensional surface which does not include gravity. THIS MEANS that the union of quantum mechanics AND gravity may require that the entire three-dimensional universe be a projection on a two-dimensional structure. This has been formalized in string theory as the holographic principle. Understanding black holes, could imply that the entire universe is a hologram.
In a more romantic description: all of us, the earth, the universe, you, and me, are simply two-dimension information trapped on the event horizon of a black hole. Waiting for protons, or some other massless particle, to project us into an artificially three-dimensional world. We are nothing more than three-dimension projections from the 2D surface. So, is reality insanely cool? Yes. Do we understand the nature of reality? Probably not. Does life, the universe, have any meaning? … Who's to say?
Our primitive brains like to cling to our understanding of reality. We hold that there are three dimensions of space, and one of time. We cling to this initial view even when physics shows us that our perception of reality is only a narrow slice of what actual reality could be.
Love and Rage,
Raina?
(not actually Raina just a hologram nothing to see here)
P.S. In my next article, I will discuss how we create a hologram from a lower dimension using invariability, and the implications of string theory. I would continue into these interesting concepts now, but physics is a rabbit hole. If I start discussing how string theory is used in this context, I'll start discussing string theory itself along with how to conceptualize higher dimensions. It is a wonderfully tangled web. I could go on, but quickly this unintimidated article will become a lengthy book.
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