The Energy Age, The Information Age

I still don't think that anything does or ever can fall 'in' to a black hole, and it still amazes me that this is ever postulated. Information itself travels at the speed of light, thus information can only exist where light exists. Where light is not (or cannot be), there is nothing, in every sense. Consideration of an impossibility at the 'centre' of a black hole is not relevant, as the centre is no more real than any other point beyond the event horizon.

The industrial revolution was a revolution of energy. Science before this was about understanding nature. In the 19th century science became a tool to control and master nature, and so it remained. Things progressed, and perhaps there were revolutionary decades since, but the turn of the 21st century certainly marked a sharp change in the power of information. The interconnection of communication networks created an information revolution, and like the energy revolution driven by water, wind, coal, steam, this revolution will lead (and has led) to new theories of nature based on the necessity of, and manipulation of, information.

What do we know of information? It requires energy to store and to maintain. It is not certain, and decays over time, is broken apart. Information is transmitted at the speed of light at most, never faster. Information is explcitly temporal - this is one of its most magical properties, and is perhaps the key to explaining the structure of space and time, and other human phenomena.

I began to think of gravity. Gravity is a wind blown by massive objects against the material of space. Space must itself be (or have) a force of a sort, which resists or opposes this wind, so space must have an elastic power. Yet space can't 'blow against' wind equally, it has no source of energy, no eternal ubiquitous battery. Gravity has an energy, space has none - yet the two can, rather oddly, battle each other. How can this be? I thought of space again, like little tiles or flaps of paper blowing in the wind of gravity. I pictured a matted structure, something like this:

The picture consists of little tiles held together by springs. The 'wind' of gravity shines out at the speed of light, it is information, and it decays in an almost magical mathematical way corresponding to the exact area over which it propagates. The parts of space touched by it need to store the information about it, the curve of space-time at each point, so the little tiles are a bit 'bent', like mirrors which reflect space into time. The interesting point is that, as information, gravity isn't a 'force' as such, merely an informing voice. If space simply stores the information about its orientation it doesn't need energy to 'resist' gravity, it merely needs to 'forget' the information when gravity stops messaging, and forgetting doesn't require energy.

If there are little springs there, then perhaps those too act as communication mediators for this information, but perhaps they are not necessary; they are only needed if each 'tile' cares about (learns from or informs) its neighbour. So, our springs which, on a visual and emotional level, feel like energy are now, again, demoted to mere conduits of information.

Information requires energy to create it and to maintain it, this appears to be universal. Gravity must supply energy to register and maintain information's presence.

As far as I understand, if the wind of gravity were to vanish instantly, space would completely forget its orientation, and instantly and without any recoil, snap back to perfect flatness. I doubt this is the case. It may perhaps make more sense if the gravitational information of space were more gradually forgotten. As a purely informational construct, it may have no recoil. Unless, recoil can apply to knowledge; denial is this emotionally. A theory of physical denial would be extraordinary indeed.

Mark Sheeky, 16 August 2023