Black Holes and Revelations: The Great Cosmic Plot Twist

In 1964, two young astronomers scrubbed their radio telescope again, convinced they'd discovered the world's most persistent pigeon problem. After cleaning their equipment repeatedly, they made a startling realisation. Rather than cosmic bird interference, they were observing the afterglow of creation itself.

Those "pigeon droppings" turned out to be the ‘cosmic microwave background’. The oldest light in the universe, it proved the Big Bang theory: the idea that everything we know today had its origins 13.8 billion years ago, with dense matter ‘inflating’ or cooling and moving apart from a single point.

Previously, Albert Einstein's equations, which revealed that space and time are not separate (but form one fabric capable of bending around matter), had led scientist and priest, Georges Lemaître, to propose something so radical that Einstein himself dismissed it: the idea that the universe had a beginning. When Lemaître claimed the universe expanding meant the existence of "a day without yesterday", Einstein retorted "your mathematics is excellent, but your physical intuition is lousy."

But Einstein was wrong. The observable universe does indeed have a start date, when it emerged from a patch of space smaller than an atom.

Today, as we peer into the Southern Hemisphere's night sky toward our galactic centre – home to 400 billion stars and trillions of planets – we may be witnessing an even more extraordinary revelation.

The James Webb Space Telescope shows us galaxies that formed earlier than our models predicted, suggesting that our theories about cosmic evolution may need an update. And the two trillion galaxies that populate the night sky are arranged, not at random as they first appear, but in a pattern.

The plot thickens when we examine black holes, yawning chasms which appear to consume all in their path, and inside which Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity predicts that time itself ends. Steven Hawking asked: if information falls into a black hole, does it get destroyed or preserved? His answer was that black holes slowly evaporate, and the information they contain is destroyed. Recent theoretical advances suggest, however, that Hawking’s initial prediction may have been wrong, and the information within black holes is ultimately returned, scrambled, to the universe – a deeply puzzling fact that Hawking himself ultimately came to accept.

And the most bizarre and unlikely twist is that the mathematics describing black hole physics appears similar to the quantum error correction codes used in quantum computers. The fabric of ‘spacetime’ isn't fundamental, as Einstein and others believed, but emerges from quantum information, like pixels forming a screen we mistake for solid reality. So, reality itself might operate like a quantum computer, with space and time emerging from deeper information processing.

That means that when we build quantum computers, we may be constructing nature itself. The implications could be staggering – although nobody is sure what they are yet.

So, there is no greater argument for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. No-one who first studied the mechanics of quantum computing was aware they would ultimately help resolve another metaphysical mindbender: understanding how the universe came to be.

One line of scientific enquiry can serendipitously answer questions in an altogether different field.

This article was inspired by a talk by Brian Cox at the Man Alternative Investing Symposium.