In Jim Holt’s enjoyable book, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, he recounts conversations with a wide variety of thinkers, from physicists and biologists to writers and philosophers, who have struggled with the Primordial Existential Question. You probably know my take on the issue, but Jim and I sat down at the LA Library a few weeks ago to chat about this and related issues. I think it’s safe to say we at least had a few laughs. Here’s the complete video; audio is also available as a podcast.
Jim Holt and Sean Carroll from ALOUDla on Vimeo.
I have heard the viewpoint that the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is incoherent/meaningless. It doesn’t seem to me to be, but I would be interested in reading a coherent/meaningful 🙂 explication of that viewpoint.
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The discovery of Firewalls, a gross violation of the equivalency principle, should have been fatal to any notion that somehow information is encoded in the black body spectrum of Hawking radiation, though I would argue the existence of Unruh radiation should have been enough to do this. It’s amusing to see the scramble this discovery has caused, even to the point of looking for Firewalls in De Sitter and Rindler horizons. The most logical conclusion is that there are no Firewalls for the simple reason that Hawking radiation is devoid of information except for the mass, spin and charge of the Black Hole, parameters which directly affect the black body spectrum of the Hawking Radiation. Black Hole evolution is non unitary. And directly related to this is the expansion of the universe, where information is likewise not conserved. There is likely a boundary where unitarity can be found for both these processes , but not in the local frame of any particular IGUS’s Decoherent history.