Fumfer Physics 38: Information, Quantum Fuzziness, and the Hidden Architecture of the Universe

Scott Douglas Jacobsen revisits a long-standing idea with Rick Rosner, tracing it from an Errol Morris documentary to Rosner’s current thinking about information and cosmology. Rosner reflects on the proton–electron mass ratio as potentially non-arbitrary, speculating that it may encode something fundamental about the universe’s informational structure. He connects quantum fuzziness, mass, curvature, and collapsed matter to a broader picture in which much of the universe’s information is hidden in gravitationally dense regions tied to earlier cosmic eras. Framed explicitly as speculation, Rosner’s view treats particle precision as possibly emergent from the universe’s total informational budget.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I remember years ago, either before we met or when we first met—this was probably twelve years ago—I remember seeing, in the Errol Morris documentary First Person, that you mentioned how, when you had your desk-and-chair setup for thinking, you found the electron–proton mass ratio interesting with regard to the structure of the world. What do you mean by that now, after more thought, with regard to characterizing information?

Rick Rosner: I believe that quantum particles are described by wavefunctions, and that “fuzziness” (uncertainty in position and momentum, and characteristic quantum length scales) is typically tiny at everyday scales. In several important physical contexts, characteristic quantum length scales shrink as mass increases, which is one reason macroscopic objects look far less “quantum-fuzzy” than electrons do.

The proton–electron mass ratio is about 1836.152673…. My guess is that this number is not arbitrary—that, with the right mathematics, it could be derived from deeper theory rather than treated as a brute empirical input.

I believe that this ratio has something to do with the amount of information in the universe, and possibly with the amount of hidden information—probably the amount of hidden information. The age of the universe since the Big Bang is about 13.8 billion years.

Information exists in a context. The active, luminous universe includes on the order of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with on the order of hundreds of billions of stars—often summarized as roughly 10²² stars in the observable universe—radiating enormous amounts of energy as light and other forms of radiation. If the universe is made of information, that active center consists of information that is largely consistent with the rest of the information in that active center. But there is other information in the universe that is not consistent with the current information.

It is old information contained in burnt-out galaxies on the fringes of the universe. That matter—these burnt-out galaxies—is largely gravitationally collapsed and located in a part of the universe with much greater curvature, which is also a gravitational property. We tend to think of that region as corresponding to the early universe.

When you look back, the farther away you look with a telescope, the earlier you see, because you are observing very old light that took billions of years to reach us. We think that the much more compressed, highly curved universe no longer exists in that form—that the universe, following the Big Bang, has continued to expand for about 13.8 billion years, spreading out so that the earlier tightness and curvature have diluted over time.

It looks like the surface of a balloon being inflated, except without a neck. What I am suggesting—speculatively—is that the “neck” still exists: that there is a part of the universe that remains highly curved and tightly compacted, and that all the collapsed matter in that tight region acts like tent pegs, keeping the active center of the universe open and highly defined. One possible indication of this highly defined nature of the universe might be the proton–electron mass ratio.

Now, I could be deluded or mistaken. The electron is treated in the Standard Model as a point particle. It has no known internal structure—just basic physical properties such as charge and spin. It is a point—technically a fuzzy point—but still a point. A proton, by contrast, has substantial internal structure.

It contains three valence quarks, along with gluons that mediate the strong force confining those quarks. There is a great deal happening inside every proton. So it is not as though, in a universe with no information or very little information, the mass ratio would be one-to-one.

I do think that—even if not specifically the proton–electron mass ratio, which I focused on somewhat naively—the precision with which particles in the universe are defined may be related to the total amount of information in the universe, including information hidden in collapsed matter from earlier eras of cosmic history.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.