*The* Universe
Physics has a time-honored tradition of laughing in the face of our most basic intuitions. Einstein's relativity forced us to retire our notions of absolute space and time, while quantum mechanics forced us to retire our notions of pretty much everything else. Still, one stubborn idea has stood steadfast through it all: the universe.
Sure, our picture of the universe has evolved over the years—its history dynamic, its origin inflating, its expansion accelerating. It has even been downgraded to just one in a multiverse of infinite universes forever divided by event horizons. But still we've clung to the belief that here, as residents in the Milky Way, we all live in a single spacetime, our shared corner of the cosmos—our universe.
In recent years, however, the concept of a single, shared spacetime has sent physics spiraling into paradox. The first sign that something was amiss came from Stephen Hawking's landmark work in the 1970s showing that black holes radiate and evaporate, disappearing from the universe and purportedly taking some quantum information with them. Quantum mechanics, however, is predicated upon the principle that information can never be lost.
Here was the conundrum. Once information falls into a black hole, it can't climb back out without traveling faster than light and violating relativity. Therefore, the only way to save it is to show that it never fell into the black hole in the first place. From the point of view of an accelerated observer who remains outside the black hole, that's not hard to do. Thanks to relativistic effects, from his vantage point, the information stretches and slows as it approaches the black hole, then burns to scrambled ash in the heat of the Hawking radiation before it ever crosses the horizon. It's a different story, however, for the inertial, infalling observer, who plunges into the black hole, passing through the horizon without noticing any weird relativistic effects or Hawking radiation, courtesy of Einstein's equivalence principle. For him, information better fall into the black hole, or relativity is in trouble. In other words, in order to uphold all the laws of physics, one copy of the bit of information has to remain outside the black hole while its clone falls inside. Oh, and one last thing—quantum mechanics forbids cloning.
Leonard Susskind eventually solved the information paradox by insisting that we restrict our description of the world to either the region of spacetime outside the black hole's horizon or to the interior of the black hole. Either one is consistent—it's only when you talk about both that you violate the laws of physics. This "horizon complementarity," as it became known, tells us that the inside and outside of the black hole are not part and parcel of a single universe. They are two universes, but not in the same breath.
Horizon complementarity kept paradox at bay until last year, when the physics community was shaken up by a new conundrum more harrowing still— the so-called firewall paradox. Here, our two observers find themselves with contradictory quantum descriptions of a single bit of information, but now the contradiction occurs while both observers are still outside the horizon, before the inertial observer falls in. That is, it occurs while they're still supposedly in the same universe.
Physicists are beginning to think that the best solution to the firewall paradox may be to adopt "strong complementarity"—that is, to restrict our descriptions not merely to spacetime regions separated by horizons, but to the reference frames of individual observers, wherever they are. As if each observer has his or her own universe.
Ordinary horizon complementarity had already undermined the possibility of a multiverse. If you violate physics by describing two regions separated by a horizon, imagine what happens when you describe infinite regions separated by infinite horizons! Now, strong complementarity is undermining the possibility of a single, shared universe. On glance, you'd think it would create its own kind of multiverse, but it doesn't. Yes, there are multiple observers, and yes, any observer's universe is as good as any other. But if you want to stay on the right side of the laws of physics, you can only talk about one at a time. Which means, really, that only one exists at a time. It's cosmic solipsism.
Sending the universe into early retirement is a pretty radical move, so it better buy us something pretty in the way of scientific advancement. I think it does. For one, it might shed some light on the disconcerting low quadrupole coincidence—the fact that the cosmic microwave background radiation shows no temperature fluctuations at scales larger than 60 degrees on the sky, capping the size of space at precisely the size of our observable universe – as if reality abruptly stops at the edge of an observer's reference frame.
More importantly, it could offer us a better conceptual grasp of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics defies understanding because it allows things to hover in superpositions of mutually exclusive states, like when a photon goes through this slit and that slit, or when a cat is simultaneously dead and alive. It balks at our Boolean logic, it laughs at the law of the excluded middle. Worse, when we actually observe something, the superposition vanishes and a single reality miraculously unfurls.
In light of the universe's retirement, this all looks slightly less miraculous. After all, superpositions are really superpositions of reference frames. In any single reference frame, an animal's vitals are well defined. Cats are only alive and dead when you try to piece together multiple frames under the false assumption that they're all part of the same universe.
Finally, the universe's retirement might offer some guidance as physicists push forward with the program of quantum gravity. For instance, if each observer has his or her own universe, then each observer has his or her own Hilbert space, his or her own cosmic horizon and his or her own version of holography, in which case what we need from a theory of quantum gravity is a set of consistency conditions that can relate what different observers can operationally measure.
Adjusting our intuitions and adapting to the strange truths uncovered by physics is never easy. But we may just have to come around to the notion that there's my universe, and there's your universe—but there's no such thing as the universe.
