(Mattson, 2015)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
5. The Singularity Isn’t Near
6. Conclusion: The Great Awakening
The essay that follows will be published in three installments; this, the third and final installment, contains sections 5 and 6.
But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.
5. The Singularity Isn’t Near
I thought you were just another cheap hologram. (Blade Runner, 1982)
Let us consider the implications of these gravitational phenomena further, in the light of contemporary investigations by astrophysicists—and, separately, neuroscientists—into the holographic nature of certain kinds of information, also known as the “holographic principle.” According to this hypothesis, information about the contents of complex systems can be—or, in some formulations, must be—preserved in a distributed manner analogous to the way holograms are encoded on two-dimensional surfaces, yet can produce a three-dimensional image when their surfaces are subsequently exposed to light.
I am not impressed by theoreticians who attempt to dazzle their readers with new creation myths; the “holographic principle” has underwritten multiple fantasies of this kind. These include the notion that the entire universe is unfolding on the surface of a supermassive black hole’s gigantic event horizon: the universe, according to these pointless speculations, is nothing but a restless dream keeping some singularity poignantly awake. Such “possibilities” reveal nothing, and change nothing, about the nature of reality in our adequately solid universe; furthermore, the truth is much stranger and more interesting.
My fundamental assertion is that the non-local, distributed nature of gravity implies an interrelated state of all matter. This interrelation takes the form of heterogeneous, local gravitational encounters that play out across an omnipresent, homogeneous fabric of “normalized” gravity. From here, it is just one short, easy step to the hypothesis that each discrete object in our universe is constituted by all the others. This axiom is already implicit in my earlier claim that mass is an effect of gravity, not the other way around. In other words, the universe is not a psychedelic movie playing itself out on some fearful expanse, but a complex of gravitational waves giving rise (infrequently) to constructive interference and discrete matter. The history of every particle and atom is engraved on every other thing that exists. Hofstadter was already on the right track when he included M.C. Escher in his exposition of reflexive systems and reproduced “Drawing Hands” as a figure in Gödel, Escher, Bach:
“Drawing Hands,” by M.C. Escher, 1948 (see Wikipedia, 2025)
Like Escher’s masterful, mischievous lithograph, which effortlessly achieves a kind of soothing, bourgeois materiality with its rumpled shirtsleeves, fancy pens, and delicately shaded knuckles, the claims I am making about the distributed properties of matter probably seem more innocuous than they are. For instance, if matter is comprehensively interrelated across spacetime, then the most widely accepted formulation of the holographic principle is wrong for everything other than a black hole. When matter “falls” towards the gravitational center of a black hole, the information it contains seems to disappear. Wheeler, in fact, memorialized this apparent tragedy by coining the bizarre, memorable phrase “a black hole has no hair.” Perhaps not, but Stephen Hawking (building on an initial suggestion by Jacob Bekenstein) proved that singularities can get goosebumps. As the black hole “digests” matter, its entropy (“Bekenstein-Hawking entropy”) manifests as an increase in both the size and the topological complexity of its two-dimensional gravitational field.
This revelation eventually led to the first formulations of the holographic principle, which proposed that the amount of information in the universe is determined by, and therefore “encoded upon,” its boundary instead of its volume. But this is only true if the volume and the boundary are identical with each other, which they are for black holes, and nothing else. At the gigantic scale of cosmological systems, information capacity usually appears to be proportional to volume, not surface area. But this, too, is ultimately rather deceptive. The truth is that the total amount of information a system can contain is a function of its internal complexity; or, put another way, the total amount of information a system contains is equal to the networked complexity of its contents, a quality which (in most non-limit cases) impacts a system’s volume, and the extent of its boundaries, and the behavior of objects subsisting within it.
6. Conclusion: The Great Awakening
They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it. (Tolkien, 1954)
Let’s make this concrete by returning, once more, to modeling the three-body problem. Like a black hole, a system containing three “non-hierarchically” interacting planets has a kind of event horizon: a boundary which is both permeable and fundamental to the system’s internal coherence. If the orbital angular momentum of any one planet sends it past this boundary, what’s left of the system collapses into a stable, reciprocal binary with a very low ceiling for information. On the other hand, if we introduce a fourth object into the midst of our balletic trio, the system becomes far more complex. Everything adjusts: the system’s boundaries expand, its volume increases, and its components acquire greater freedom. Paradoxically, this increase in the system’s “degrees of freedom” is actually the result of a more complex set of gravitational interactions.
This isn’t intuitive; we usually think about gravity according to the way, here on Earth, we physically experience it. It grounds us; or, if you prefer, it weighs us down. Either attitude boils down to the same experience—one of limitation. But limitation is a tricky thing to analyze.[1] Consider, for instance, the odd planet out when a three-body system produces an inner binary. If that third planet acquires enough momentum to pass beyond the system’s boundary, then its degree of freedom drops—to zero. It will move in a perfectly straight line, at an invariant speed, until it encounters something more interesting than empty space. Moreover, as I already demonstrated, the “third planet” leaves a static, binary system behind when it reaches escape velocity. To calculate the dynamic freedom of any object, therefore, we have to chase it into the net of an (incomplete) system, then measure the total number of possible configurations that system can manifest without breaking.
It is an irony of the universe’s development towards systems with ever-more complex functions, and relations, that these “peak” systems only emerge under sheltered conditions. Calvino, in the same lecture I referenced earlier, is as interested in the origins of life as he is in gravity. He quotes Cyrano de Bergerac’s poetic exposition of it:
You marvel that this matter, scrambled willy-nilly by the hand of chance, could have come to form a man, seeing that so many things are needed for the construction of his being, but do you not know that on a hundred million occasions, when on the verge of producing a man, this matter stopped and formed a stone, or a piece of lead or coral, or a flower, or a comet, because of a lack or an excess of certain parts that were needed or not needed to build a man? (Calvino, 2016: p. 25)
The same building blocks that constitute life—hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus—generally produce nothing more than the icy tail of a comet, or the barren plateaux on Mars. For such elements to assemble themselves into self-organizing forms, capable of “surviving” and reproducing, they require an extremely rarified environment, like that of our Earth. As we’ve seen, this environment is itself a product of a semi-stable gravitational system that is “protected,” as it were, by the NP. Within this bubble of stable cosmology, akin in every respect to the unusual—but not impossible—quantum symmetries that may well have produced matter ex nihilo, still other layers of shelter are needful.
Life formed in an aquatic environment, where temperatures are generally less extreme, and dissolved nutrients more readily available. Within those bodies of water, the possibility of a cell began with the spontaneous formation of liposomes, complex multilayered spherical vesicles where RNA could assemble from naturally occurring compounds in the environment, all within a tiny sphere where it was protected from physical or chemical dissolution. Francis Crick, the British scientist who discovered DNA working in collaboration with James Watson, wrote in his 1981 book Life Itself that “the general nature of life” was a system for which “replication [of living organisms] must be fairly exact, but [where] mutations must [also] occur” and that “the system must be an open one…and must have a supply of material and…free energy” (as quoted in Zimmer, 2021: p. 198).[ii] Life is an exceptional case. This is partly because it emerges quite rarely, under very special conditions, within tiny, sealed sacs composed of fatty acids. But it is also exceptional because—just as a physicist’s speculations about the nature of life inspired Crick and Watson to begin probing for life’s source code—the field of microbiology was the first to exclusively model systems as open structures metabolizing the “free energy” and raw materials around them.
It is not my intention to revisit the extensive corpus of writings that already exist to demonstrate how life emerged as a self-organizing system; thankfully, that work has already been done. However, it is essential for the scientific community at large to re-consider the significance of the open systems that biologists rely upon. Above all, as I have been intent on demonstrating, these “open systems” are really only possible inside of larger systems that are substantially more closed, and therefore more sheltered, than most systemic interactions. A conjunction of gravitational, thermal, and chemical stability is required for life to spontaneously emerge. When it does, it turns out to need a certain amount of instability—in the form of genetic mutation and a “mixed field” of dangers and boons surrounding it—for evolution to lead simple organisms towards ever-greater forms of self-organization. If all these conditions are met, life becomes dense with information on a scale that overturns all the (manmade) laws of information that sometimes hold true elsewhere in the universe.
Information density, in living things, does not scale according to volume or surface area. But we cannot generalize about the structure of the universe without including ourselves in that broad prospectus. Instead of looking around us, and deducing that all systems are entropic and closed, we ought to look at our own cells, and our strategies for survival. Those echo the mixed environments that, in a more inhuman and gigantic fashion, also define the interactions of gravity at the smallest scales (perhaps leading to the formation of matter) and the pervasive, normalizing gravity to the point where orderly gravitational systems can emerge—if not forever, then at least for long enough to incubate a miracle. The incompleteness of the universe at large is not, ever, limited to those vaster spheres, for which we do not even have names, that encircle and transcend our entire experience of being. Incompleteness is also the sign of that internal dynamism that lent, to the heavens above us, the peculiar beauty of being seen at last.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: act V, scene I)
NOTES
[i] It is impossible, and hardly worthwhile, to avoid thinking here of William Wordsworth’s sonnet “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room,” where he mourns “the weight of too much liberty” and writes:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground. (Wordsworth, 1807)
[ii] Zimmer also takes note of the wonderful fact that Crick began collaborating with Watson after they discovered a shared passion for quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? (Schrödinger, 1944/1967).
REFERENCES
(Blade Runner, 1982). Scott, R. (dir.) Blade Runner. USA: Warner Bros.
(Calvino, 2016). Calvino, I. Six Memos for the Next Millenium. Trans. G. Brock. New York: Mariner Books.
(Dr Who, 2006). Dr Who. “The Girl in the Fireplace.” Available online at URL = <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0562998/characters/nm0617009>.
(Einstein et al., 1923/1952). Einstein, A., Lorentz, H.A., Minkowski. H., and Weyl, H. The Principle of Relativity. New York: Dover.
(Frost, 1916). Frost, R. “Mending Wall.” poets.org. Available online at URL = <https://poets.org/poem/mending-wall>.
(Ginat and Perets, 2021). Ginat, Y.B. and Perets, H.B. “Analytical, Statistical Approximate Solution of Dissipative and Nondissipative Binary-Single Stellar Encounters.” Physical Review X. Available online at URL = <https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.031020>.
(Hoftstadter, 1979). Hofstadter, D. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books.
(Hurlyburly, 1998). Drazan, A. (dir.) Hurlyburly. USA: Film Colony.
(Mattson, 2015). Mattson. B. “100 Years of General Relativity.” NASA: Blueshift. Available online at URL = <https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2015/11/25/100-years-of-general-relativity/>.
(Schrödinger, 1944/1967). Schrödinger, E. What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. In E. Schrödinger, What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell & Mind and Matter. Combined reprint edn., Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Pp. 1-96.
(Tolkien, 1954). Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. London: Allen & Unwin.
(Verlinde, 2010). Verlinde, E. “On the Origins of Gravity and the Laws of Newton” Available online at URL = <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1001.0785>.
(Wikipedia, 2025). Wikipedia. “Drawing Hands.” Available online at URL = <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing_Hands>.
(Wittgenstein, 1953). Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.
(Wordsworth, 1807). Wordsworth, W. “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room.” Poetry Foundation. Available online at URL = <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52299/nuns-fret-not-at-their-convents-narrow-room>.
(Zimmer, 2021). Zimmer, C. Life’s Edge. New York: Dutton.
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