Testing the Limits of the Unknowable

I read an amazing article in New Scientist recently, about scientists searching for gravitational waves and possibly finding something much more important. This is kind of a neat by product of good science, where the person doing the testing finds something went wrong and says, "Oh, that's interesting..." before going on to, for instance, invent the microwave oven, penicillin, or the flying machine.

You can pretty squarely blame Stephen Hawking's brilliance. Once again studying event horizons , he theorized that information from an "evaporating" black hole does not get lost when it disappears, but is mapped onto the virtual quantum particles at its edge. That edge, kind of like a shadow, is a two dimensional form that exists in our three dimensional universe, and that information has to make a weird transition from the inside of the black hole, where it's 3D, to the outside, where it's 2D. Another good example of 3D information mapped onto a 2D surface is holograms, hence the title, "Our world may be a giant hologram..." which is slightly inaccurate, since the set of things that might be holograms include every particle in the universe, of which our world is only a tiny, tiny part.

They go on to connect more dots. The event horizon of a black hole is roughly analogous to the the Big Bang, when everything in the universe was packed into a segment of space smaller than an atom. What blew it apart is a complete mystery still, but the behavior of all that mass in that tiny amount of space is exactly like a black hole. Even more amazing, if you were able to travel faster than light, 13.7 billion light years in any direction, you would reach the edge of the universe, where you would see an inside-out version of the mapping going on at the edges of black holes. In fact, all of the matter in our universe would have the information of the big bang mapped onto it.

All of this really gets my science and science fiction juices flowing, so I'm going to subject you to some of my thoughts. Here goes:

• As a black hole evaporates, the event horizon grows smaller, since the mass inside of it no longer has the ability to capture light as far away from the singularity inside of it. Our universe is different, though, since it's basically a black hole turned inside out. And evidence has shown that the energy inside of our universe is increasing, as matter is pushed farther apart as the result of "dark energy," which might, uncounted eons from now, result in space flying apart so quickly that even atoms are unable to hold together. This would be called "the Big Rip." (Which is the opposite of what scientists expected when they made up "the Big Crunch.")
  
• Does this mean that the total amount of information in the universe is increasing? And can an increasing amount of information result in the one-way temporal direction known as entropy?
• What caused the expansion of the universe in the first place? This is beyond the scope of the article, but I'm dreadfully curious. Since the force is so mysterious, almost any speculation is useless, but I wonder if I can spin another analogy with atomic nuclei. Put two protons near each other and they fly apart, but include a neutron and they stay together, forming a helium nucleus. Put two neutrons and it's a helium nucleus in a special case known as an alpha particle. Three neutrons and it's unstable again. Move up the periodic table of the elements in order of neutrons and protons and you see this happen again, with the more things packed into the nucleus, the more unstable they become. Except... as humans experiment with energies not found in nature, there is some evidence that there might be what some call "islands of stability" hidden in the far recesses, well after Thorium and Einsteinium and Yourmomium. What if the universe is the inverse of that, with a lot of stability in relatively lower masses ("lower" being a relative term, since we're talking masses smaller than galactic superclusters), but explosive when enough mass is reached.
• Given that quantum mechanics means almost anything can happen if you wait long enough, and virtual particle-antiparticle pairs appear and disappear constantly at a scale impossible for us to detect, eventually in a very, very long timeframe, it is possible that a particle could appear that is the mass of the entire universe. The challenge is that it's impossible to test, except in very, very long timeframes, and I just don't have that kind of patience.
• One result of the above is that an antiparticle would have to also have been produced, which is interesting, because I always wanted to have an evil twin. And now I've got one.
  

Normally, I like to include a picture with a post, but the photographer I sent outside the universe to take a snapshot is bound by the laws of spacetime, and promises to return in 27.4 billion years, which is well below the time constraint for "the Big Rip," but too late for this post to have any relevance. I'll do better next time.