[ExI] Trespassing On Einstein’s Lawn

Sat Apr 23 20:56:45 UTC 2016

I just finished 
Amanda Gefter’s new book, Trespassing On Einstein’s Lawn,

physicist Sean Carroll
called it
 “The most charming book ever written about the fundamental nature of
reality” and I think he’s right. Gefter is obsessed with answering the
question “why is there
 something rather than nothing?" ; needless to say she hasn't found a
definitive answer but I have found 46 points in the book that may have some
relevance to the question:   

1) A good definition of "nothing" is infinite unbounded homogeneity
.

2)  A “thing” is defined by it’s boundaries; a blank paper is not a picture
until
 a line is drawn
 on it
.

3) Godel’s Theorem is a good thing because it provides a boundary and
without a boundary there is no

thing.

4) The boundary of a boundary is zero so everything you need to know about
the interior
of a thing 
is on the boundary.

5) Something and nothing are not opposites just different ways of looking
at the same thing.

6) A person’s light cone might provide the boundary to turn nothing into
something.

7) The Big Bang happened everywhere.

8) Bits are the fundamental building blocks of reality.

9
) Paradoxes always crop up when you try to describe physics from a God’s
eye view
,
so such a view can not exist.

10
) Spacetime curvature does not require a God’s eye view, it can be measured
from within.

11) For electromagnetism you have to expend energy to make a large
electrical charge but with gravity it’s the
o
pposite, it wants to make things

lumpy

so

unlike electromagnetism gravity
has
 a negative contribution to total energy in the universe.

12
) The universe has zero energy.

13
) But zero is too precise a number for
Quantum M
echanics because
"
nothing
"
is unstable.

14
) The vacuum’s virtual field gives quarks 95% of their mass, the Higgs
field does the rest.

16
) Quantum particles don’t have positions in spacetime only probabilities.

17
) Something is ultimately real only if it is invariant.

18
) Progress in physics comes from discovering what was thought to be real is
actually observer dependent.

19) A inertial observer
in free fall sees
a straight line through space time.

20
) Others see the person accelerating in a gravitational field tracing out
more and more space in less time
. and thus

producing
a curved world line.

21
) You can turn a curve into a straight line by stretching the paper,
gravity stretches spacetime.

22
)
A
 curved world line in flat spacetime is exactly the same as a straight
world line in curved spacetime.

23
) A gauge force fixes the mismatch between observers, gravity is a gauge
force as are all the fundamental forces in physics.

24
) The local curvature of spacetime cancels out energy and momentum
,
and that’s why mass curves spacetime.

25
) In General
R
elativity
m
ass (and
because E=MC^2
 energy
 too
) is only defined within reference frames, it is observer dependent.

26
) Entropy is a measure of hidden information
,
and a event horizon can hide information.

27
) Entropy is not conserved.

28
) The more symmetric something is the less information it contains.

29
) The Entropy of nothing is zero.

30
) The very early universe was smooth and
symmetrical
 and thus had low Entropy.

31
) Gravity wants to make the universe lumpy and thus increase it’s Entropy.

32
) The maximum number of bits of information inside a sphere is equal to one
fourth the area of the surface in Planck Areas.

33
)
A
 Black Hole
contains as much information as any volume can, although its
 amount is proportional to
the Black Hole's
 surface not its volume.

34
)

Hawking radiation is observer dependent.

35)
 A unmeasured bit of quantum information can not be perfectly copied, if
you could then you could outsmart the uncertainty principle.

36
) Quantum Mechanics says information can’t be destroyed but
General Relativity says it can be, the confrontation comes to a head in 
Black Holes.

37
) A outside observer would say information never crosses the Event Horizon
of a Black hole 
but stays on the surface.

38
) A observer falling into the Black Hole would say information
does 
cross the Event Horizon without incident and nothing unusual happens until
the Singularity
 is reached
.

39
) A black hole the mass of our sun,  would take about 10^67 years to
evaporate by Hawking Radiation.

40
) Hawking Radiation contains information on what went into a Black Hole.

41
) The time needed to decode Hawking Radiation increases exponentially even
with a Quantum Computer.

42
) It would take not 10^67 but 10^10^67 years to compute what went into the
Black Hole from the Hawking Radiation that came out of it, and the Black
Hole would be long gone by then.

43
) The location of information is observer dependent, so nobody can see the
same quantum bit at 2 different locations at the same time because
n
o observer can see both inside and outside a Black Hole horizon at the same
time.

4
4
) If Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity don’t contradict each other

that must mean that if you haven’t
finished the computation
then
the information is
 not there yet.

45)
The only thing that's invariant is nothing

46) 
Reality is observer dependent, and the weirdness in physics doesn’t come
from non-locality but
from 
non-reality.

 John K Clark
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