The Moniverse

IThe vision

The world is not made of things. It is made of information, and what we call matter, energy, space and time is the shape information takes when it organises itself. Observing is neither creating nor disturbing: it is coupling. And the same structure repeats at every scale, from the smallest to the largest. I call this way of looking the Moniverse.

Put like that, though, the word “information” does no work: it is too convenient, it explains everything and therefore explains nothing. It began to do work when I broke it into two things that are usually run together: how much information there is in a place, and how far it can move there. They are two different quantities, and one can exist without the other. Everything else on this page follows from that split.

The river and its bed

If information is the river and the capacity to propagate is its bed, a dam may hold the water back, but the water can never be blocked completely and for ever: a lake evaporates, then it brims over. And if there were a way to stop it for ever, reality would not exist.

Information is the river: it is there, and it is never lost. It moves, it gathers, it thins out, but the total does not change. The capacity to propagate is the bed: it says how far the river can run at that point, and that one can indeed be used up — locally, and for a time.

From here comes the thing I care about most, because it does not describe: it forbids. Water is not stopped by a dam. It is diverted. It rises, goes round, seeps, evaporates, brims over. You can hold it for a year, for a century, for as long as you like, but not for ever: a permanent block does not exist in nature, it exists only in badly written equations. And if there really were a place where the river stops for ever, that place would be outside the world — whatever fell into it would never come back, and reality, which is made of that same substance, would have a leak it drains through.

Not being a physicist I can prove almost nothing, but this much I can demand: any description that produces a permanent block is wrong before it is ever compared with a measurement, because it contradicts the first brick of the whole structure. That is a criterion, not a story, and it holds exactly where the data do not reach.

And so a black hole does not hold anything back. It closes over — like water over a stone, which parts to let it through and an instant later looks as though the stone had never been there.

I know where the image breaks, and it is worth saying at once. A river bed is passive and pre-existing, whereas here it is the water that carves its own bed. And above all: a lake evaporates because the water leaves through the air, which is not the river bed. My picture has no air: everything has to travel through the bed, and there is no second channel. Exactly where the metaphor is at its most beautiful, it hides the piece I am missing.

Black holes as places with no information

This is the most radical image I have, and I keep it even though it is the one that gives me the most trouble. A black hole is not a place where information is hidden. It is a place where there is none.

The difference sounds slight and it is not. Hidden means it is there and cannot be seen: behind a door, under the sand, beyond too great a distance. All you would need is the right instrument, or the right angle, or time. A place without information does not call for a better instrument: there is nothing there to read, because there is nothing left that can happen. It is the difference between a dark room and a blind eye. Into the dark room you bring a lamp. With the blind eye no lamp will do: what is missing is the place where light would become something.

Stay inside that idea for a moment, because it is something you never meet in ordinary life. It is not emptiness — emptiness is full of things happening. It is not silence — silence is a sound that could be there. It is a point of the world at which the very possibility of something new happening has ended. If you looked at a black hole from close up you would not see a black thing: you would see the place where things stop having a where.

There is a milder version of the same image, and it is the one the arithmetic tolerates better, because it is already the settled physics of black holes and not an idea of mine: not an emptiness, but a page written right out to the margins. Information is there, more of it than anywhere else in the universe; what is missing is the white space to write any more. The horizon is then neither a wall nor a door: it is the point where the sheet ends. From outside, the two readings — there is nothing there, it is so full that nothing more will fit — are indistinguishable. Both of them say: nothing comes back from there.

Indistinguishable from outside — and to me they are not even two. They are the same thing seen from two sides, and the side that holds them together is this: there is no inside inside. Information does not go in — it piles up on the horizon, stays there, and disperses from there. Not because a barrier turns it back, but because beyond that surface there is nowhere to go: the sheet has no reverse side. The page is written right out to the margins because the page is all there is. And so there is nothing inside precisely because everything stayed on top.

Where it breaks: the arithmetic sides with the second and against the first. The horizon of a black hole is, per unit of surface, the most information-rich object known — there is no emptiness in it at all. This is not a conclusion of this work: it is the standard result tying the entropy of the horizon to its area. So my strongest image is also the one mathematics corrects most, and I keep it because it made me ask the right question, not because it is right. The reconciliation has its own debt too, and it is worth saying: that propagation halts there is, in my framework, an assumed boundary condition, not a derived one; and the boundary that would hold the information and put it back into circulation is one I have not built. It remains the most important open box I have.

The end of a star, and the dot on the television

Old cathode-ray televisions — which older readers will remember — did not switch off at once. You pressed the button and the picture collapsed into a thin line, the line shrank into a bright dot at the centre of the screen, and that dot stayed there a moment longer, on its own, before it went. It was not a fault in the set: it was the phosphor giving back, slowly, the light it had received.

The end of a star does that. The picture contracting is the matter collapsing. The dot is the horizon: the surface on which everything that star has been stays imprinted. And the glow that leaves last, when everything else has already gone out, is evaporation — a black hole radiates very faintly, and over an enormous time it uses itself up.

I like it because it turns the word “end” around. The dot is not what is left over from the broadcast: it is the broadcast still being given back by a screen that is already off. A star does not end when it stops shining. It stops shining, and begins to give back.

Where it breaks: on the screen the phosphor returns exactly the light it took in, so the image promises something I cannot yet deliver — that what goes in comes back out. That is the open debt of this work, and it is recorded as a debt and not as a result.

The burnt pixel

Staying with screens: a black hole is a burnt pixel in the screen of the world. The screen goes on working. The picture runs, the colours are right, nobody throws the set away over one point. But that point does not: it no longer responds to anything that reaches it.

What interests me is that a burnt pixel does not make a hole in the screen. There is no opening, you cannot see the wall behind. The surface is whole there too: it is a defect inside the surface, not a break in the surface. If the universe is a surface being written on, black holes are not holes. They are points where the writing no longer takes, in the middle of a page that stays whole.

Where it breaks: a burnt pixel does not disturb its neighbours, and a black hole does the exact opposite — it is the thing that bends everything around it more than anything else does.

The two corks

Two corks float far apart on the same stretch of water. A wave goes through. They rise and fall together, and if you watched only the corks you would swear there was a thread tying them together below the surface. There is no thread. There is one wave, and they are two points at which it can be read.

That is how I see entanglement: not two objects joined by something running between them, but one single object that I am in the habit of counting as two because I touch it in two places. And the double slit is the same image seen from another side: the wave goes through both openings because a wave has no “where” — the cork does. Nobody has to choose a slit. There only has to be, afterwards, a point at which the wave is read.

I know where this image breaks, and it is the point where a physicist would rightly jump on me: two corks would not be enough to explain how much the two measurements resemble each other. A common wave moving both of them is precisely the explanation the experiments have ruled out. The image is there to remove the thread between the two corks; it is not there to explain the resemblance.

The observer is the observed

That leaves the part about whoever is doing the looking, and it is the part I care about most. The human eye has molecules that respond to light between 380 and 700 nanometres. X-rays cross the same room; so do radio waves. We do not see them, and it is not a matter of technology or of paying attention: that molecule and that radiation do not engage. Like a USB socket and a headphone jack — not a question of will, a question of shape.

So when people ask me what the observer does, the answer is: nothing. It neither creates reality nor disturbs it. It couples with the part of the world that has its own shape. What you see is not what you chose to see, nor everything that is there: it is the intersection between how you are made and how the flow is made. From which follows a vertiginous consequence, which I keep in view even though I cannot yet put it to the test: there may be whole portions of reality that are inaccessible not because they are far off or faint, but because no instrument made the way we are made can engage them. Like radio waves for the eye, and insuperably so.

And if that is so, the line between the one who looks and what is looked at is convenient, but it is not true. Krishnamurti repeated a four-word formula for decades — the observer is the observed — while talking about something else entirely, with no mathematics and wanting none. I do not bring him in as proof: a philosophical convergence tells you which genus you belong to, not that you are right. I bring him in because when I wrote my third postulate I realised it was the same sentence, said worse and fifty years late.

The same water, at different densities

The last piece is the one that holds the others together: the same structure repeats at every scale. There is no ladder to climb from matter up to knowledge, with hard labour on the bottom rung and thought on the top one. There is one flow that changes density. Ice and steam are the same water, and between them there is no hierarchy.

It is the part of the lens I use most often, and the part that will never produce a number. A farmer’s hands that know when the earth is ready and a program running inside a silicon chip are making the same gesture at two different densities: organising information inside material constraints. The material changes — earth, iron, silicon — the principle does not. And if the principle is the same on every turn, then we are not climbing anywhere: we are going round, and each turn comes back past the same point a little higher up.

This is the Moniverse. I have spent years on it because it holds together things that normally live in separate rooms, and holds them without strain: a black hole that stops ringing after it has been struck, a universe that expands but not equally in every direction, an animal that lives as long as it weighs. Three disciplines, three literatures, three languages that do not speak to one another — and a single lens that showed them to me as the same thing seen from three distances.

IIWhen I asked it for numbers

Then I did the thing that ruins visions, and I did it on purpose.

Because a lens that explains everything forbids nothing, and what forbids nothing cannot be wrong, and what cannot be wrong is not an explanation: it is a frame, and frames look good round any picture at all. Whatever I had observed — that thing, and its opposite too — I could have told as a configuration of information, and walked away satisfied. What saves a vision is not softening it: it is forcing it to state a number.

So I put the Moniverse into a form that can be checked. Every claim recorded with a stable identifier, its source and its status — proposed, assumed, derived, withdrawn. The rigorous text and its plain-language rendering on two parallel tracks. And programs that check that the two do not contradict each other. It is the boring part; it is also the only thing that lets me tell you now what happened, instead of remembering it the way that suits me. Here is what happened, in the order it happened.

First: the central quantity was Einstein

Everything rests on the river bed — how far information can move, at a point. Doing the calculation properly, that quantity does not resemble a component of the geometry of space-time: it is that component, written in a vocabulary of my own. From which it follows that nothing I had derived from it in ordinary conditions was mine: it was Einstein. That is how the explanation of the Hubble tension fell — the disagreement between two ways of measuring how fast the universe expands — which was the result I was proudest of and the one I had told most often.

Second: a pillar vanished by changing the clock

I held that a star, radiating for billions of years, used up a little of the river bed. The quantity came out very small, and that felt reassuring. It was not: a factor that depends only on time can be removed by changing the way time is measured. An effect you can make disappear by changing clocks is not a small effect. It is not an effect. And in the version where it could have meant something, it was already ruled out by measurements of the Sun available since 2020, which I had never looked at. The error had hidden precisely in the fact that the number was small: a small quantity looks like a small effect, therefore plausible, therefore nobody checks it.

Third: the route that would have saved the information is closed

This is the blow that strikes the river exactly where I liked it best. There is an accepted result in physics that describes how information can avoid being lost while a black hole evaporates — how, that is, the bed can reopen. I checked whether I could lean on it: no. My own assumption about the horizon and that result exclude one another. Today, inside my own work, “information is not lost” is a declared wish and not a result. The river that closes over remains a beautiful image and an unpaid promissory note.

The biological branch

The biological branch started from the idea of a budget: every irreversible event uses up something finite, and telomeres — the caps at the ends of chromosomes, which shorten with every cell division — would be the bookmark showing how much is left. It was the most original part of the project, and it is the part that has to do with how long a living thing stays coherent. I look to science and philosophy for the answers others find in faith, and I do not say that against anyone: they are different roads to the same question. That question, for me, is not abstract: I have an illness that puts it in front of me.

The branch has been withdrawn. The two readings diverged by a factor of 56 and had opposite signs, and the data told against the framework’s own definition.

And then something I was not looking for

While correcting an error in a quantity I called maximum density, I found that it is not a constant at all: it depends on the size of the region you look at, and it changes by forty-five orders of magnitude between a black hole and the observable universe. Applied at the scale of the whole universe, the corrected formula returns the cosmological critical density on its own — the number that decides the fate of the universe. I had not put it in by hand and I was not looking for it: it came out of a definition done properly. From which it follows that the horizon of the universe and the horizon of a black hole are the same kind of place — the burnt pixel and the edge of the screen, turning out to be made of the same stuff. It is not a testable prediction, and I do not pass it off as one. It is the finest result this work has produced.

What I have left to play

One thing only, and it has to do with sound. When two black holes merge, the object that results vibrates and then settles, like a struck bell: those vibrations are gravitational waves, and they are measured. For general relativity, at the edge of a black hole the wave enters and continues. In my reading, at the edge the medium carrying it ends — and the wave is neither swallowed nor reflected: it ceases. Like a sound meeting neither a wall nor an open door, but the end of the air.

From that difference it follows that the higher notes of the bell must deviate from what is expected, and that the deviation must grow note after note. The numerical window the signature has to fall inside was fixed before the calculation was done, not after: if it falls outside, I am wrong, and there is no room left for reformulation. The calculation is not finished. It is the only thing I have left to put to the test.

IIIClosing thoughts

Twenty claims withdrawn out of eighty-nine, and not one of them fell because an experiment said “false”. They all fell from internal rereadings, or from finally reading in full texts I had been citing at second hand. I do not delete them: they stay on the record, with their date and with the status they had when I believed them. The memory of what was thought before is the most valuable part of work like this, and an archive that keeps only what survived is not an archive: it is a shop window.

The other side of the argument I had to build myself. I am not a physicist and I cannot contradict a calculation: a mathematical criticism is, for me, unfalsifiable — I can believe it or refuse it out of pride, and neither of those is a method. So I had my own conclusions attacked by people with an incentive to demolish them, with the lines of attack written down before the calculations. In one night two conclusions I had already labelled as derived — the strongest label in my scheme — were overturned. And the review noted something I would never have seen on my own: the prose was systematically stronger than the numbers, always in the direction of the cleaner story. The errors were not randomly distributed — they left out precisely what would have saved the case.

Out of that came the rule that binds me now, and it runs in the opposite direction to the one you would expect: finding a flaw is half the work. The other half is trying to repair it, including by oblique routes and including more than once; only after explicit and failed attempts is something declared dead, listing first what was tried. A demolition without an attempt at rescue is not rigour: it is laziness with the air of rigour. And there is the opposite failing, which I have found in myself: a ledger kept only on the debit side, where the debts are counted and never the credits. Physics accepts singularities, dark matter, dark energy, and does not fall — not because they are forgiven, but because the balance is in credit. The right measure is not how many things fail to add up: it is how many successful predictions per ingredient put in by hand. That ratio, for the Moniverse, I have not yet worked out. It is an omission, not a result.

And there is a reckoning, which carries a date.

The numbers carry the date because the work continues: in six months they will be different ones, and this page will stay what it is — a snapshot, not a document to be maintained.

What is left, then. Not “the theory holds”: it is not a theory, and it does not hold. The lens is left, and it is good for thinking with even where it produces no numbers. The river and its bed as two distinct things rather than one. Observation as coupling rather than as choice. The same structure at every scale. There is a result nobody was looking for, and a prediction, one only, still to be calculated. And there are questions that are sharper today than they were before I built them and took them apart: what metabolism actually uses up, if it is not what I thought; why, out of all the possible outcomes of a measurement, only one occurs; whether the fundamental level has content of its own where gravity is strong, or inside bodies, which are the places I had not yet looked.

I come back to the question I opened with, which has stayed exactly where it was: what is all this, and what have I got to do with it. I have no answer. I have a way of looking that, under checking, has narrowed rather than widened, and by the standard I set myself that is the sign it is working. The river, meanwhile, goes on flowing on its own account, and takes no interest whatever in what I have written about it.

If you know more than I do — and you probably do — you are welcome to tell me where I am wrong. The way to do that is the contact page.