Will the Universe Remember You?
Rewriting Reality Beyond Einstein

We have all been there I guess. Staring up at a starlit sky wondering ‘What is this?’. What is reality? I grew up in a world, like most of us, where we’ve leaned on Albert Einstein’s foundation of a universe of curved space-time, where gravity bends the cosmic stage into elegant arcs. His general relativity painted existence as a smooth, predictable dance of stars and planets.

As I have spent years listening to so many bright minds pondering what this means, and how our most foundational understanding of physics fits together. One crack in this picture that has haunted physicists for decades is the ‘Black Hole Information Paradox’, a puzzle that asks whether the essence of matter—its information—vanishes when swallowed by a black hole’s abyss. In short, when something goes into a black hole, where does (its information) the ‘it’ got?

If the information is lost, quantum mechanics, the strange rulebook of the subatomic world, crumbles. Unless you have a degree in physics or have gone down the philosophical rabbit holes pondering the nature of reality, it might not be quite clear what some of the brightest minds following the footsteps of Einstein & Co. are trying to tell us, but it might have some severe implications – even for Einstein himself.

The End of Space-Time

For years now, my co-author and friend Dr. Florian Neukart and I have been dancing at the intersection of philosophy and science – we call it Sci-Phi. As an Austrian he held strongly on to the foundation of modern physics that was laid out on a theoretical level one hundred years ago by fellow Austrian Erwin Schrödinger and others. The problem for Florian – and now also for me – is that we are now moving beyond the theoretical level and looking at the practical implications through the emergence of computation unlike anything seen in the history of physics and our species. 

Some months back, Florian approached me with his most recent publication around what he has titled the Quantum Memory Matrix, or QMM – a hypothesis that reimagines space-time not as a passive backdrop but as a dynamic archive. Or put differently:  according to Florian, the universe itself may function as a kind of memory, recording every quantum interaction – such as particle states and field configurations – while the inclusion of thoughts remains metaphorical unless defined within physical processes. Rather than refuting event, every particle, perhaps even every thought. In challenging Einstein’s seamless cosmos, this invites us to build upon it expanding our understanding of how geometry and information might be woven together, and what it means to be conscious in a universe that might never forget.

Einstein’s universe was a masterpiece of geometry, a four-dimensional weave where time and space meld into one. But the Black Hole Information Paradox reveals the limitations of treating geometry alone as the carrier of physical truth.. When a star collapses into a black hole, quantum mechanics insists that no information—its mass, spin, or quantum state—should be lost. Yet, Stephen Hawking’s calculations suggested that black holes evaporate through radiation that seems to carry no trace of what fell in, threatening the principle of unitarity, the quantum law that says information is eternal. Reconciling this tension requires going beyond Einstein — not by discarding relativity, but by enriching it. The Geometry–Information Duality, a key concept in Florian’s work shows that geometry and information are deeply entangled — spacetime curvature reflects an underlying quantum-informational structure, leading us toward a more complete framework.

Picture the universe at its smallest scale, the Planck length—10⁻³⁵ meters, a realm so tiny it defies intuition. Here, space-time isn’t smooth but grainy, composed of discrete Planck-scale cells, each endowed with a finite-dimensional Hilbert space that acts like a cosmic archive, imprinting every quantum event. Florian proposes that when a particle falls into a black hole, its information isn’t lost but etched into this matrix, retrievable through subtle patterns in Hawking radiation – the faint glow of an evaporating black hole. This idea, rooted in quantum gravity,  recasts space-time as an active participant in the universe’s story not just a canvas, but a memory-laden that holds the past within the present. It’s a vision that extend Einstein’s continuous space-time into  a pixelated, quantum aware fabric.

This theory does not just rewrite physics; it reshapes our understanding of reality itself. If QMM is right, the universe is a kind of memory bank, where every event—every star’s birth, every photon’s path—is archived in space-time’s fabric. This suggests a reality that’s inherently reflective, where nothing is truly lost. Unlike other approaches that discretize space-time geometrically — such as Loop Quantum Gravity or spin foam models — the QMM framework introduces a network of Planck-scale quantum memory cells, each associated with a finite-dimensional Hilbert space. These cells not only quantize geometry, but also locally encode quantum information. In doing so, QMM extends Einstein’s smooth continuum by embedding within it a dynamic, informational substructure, challenging the very texture of the universe through a synthesis of geometry and information. But the implication stretches further, touching the human heart of existence: how do we perceive a world that remembers or computes us?

From Matter to Meaning

If space-time is a quantum archive, as QMM suggests, then, in principle, every quantum interaction — including those constituting physical processes in the brain—may leave an imprint in its structure. This invites a profound philosophical speculation: that moments of wonder or flickers of doubt could, through their physical correlates, become part of  the universe’s memory, suggesting a kind of cosmic continuity. Our lives, fleeting as they seem, might persist in the informational substrate of space-time. If the universe remembers, as QMM proposes, then every decision —every word spoken, every gaze at the stars—may carry informational weight, etched into the fabric of reality itself. This rethinking of what it means to act or to exist invites us to see the world not as an indifferent void, but as a reflective canvas that holds our passage through time. Yet if QMM reimagines quantum memory at the heart of physical law, a very different vision comes from the provocative ideas of Gerard ‘t Hooft. In his Cellular Automaton Interpretation (CAI), he proposes’t Hooft argues that the universe is fundamentally classical, unfolding like a deterministic clockwork of discrete states. Reality, in this view, resembles a vast computational lattice—each cell flipping on or off according to fixed rules, like bits in a cosmic program. Quantum mechanics, with its  superpositions and inherent indeterminism are seen not as fundamental, but as a statistical approximation born of our ignorance of the true underlying variables. Even black hole information, according to CAI, is preserved not through entangled radiation but in the deterministic evolution of this hidden classical structure. While CAI seeks to demystify quantum theory by reducing it to deterministic logic, QMM preserves the essential quantum features of our universe.

Unlike ‘t Hooft’s cellular automata, QMM retains full quantum coherence, supporting entanglement, superposition, and unitarity at its core. If CAI holds, even our conscious experiences are outputs of a deterministic machine, our free will an illusion crafted by the universe’s ticking gears. These ideas echo ancient philosophical debates—free will versus fate, self versus cosmos—now recast in the language of Planck-scale physics. If CAI is true, our perceptions are the output of a grand computation, urging us to seek the hidden rules behind life’s apparent chaos. Both perspectives inspire awe: the universe is not a cold void but a dynamic system, quantum or classical, that cradles our story. Yet, proving these ideas is a distant dream. Detecting Planck-scale effects—whether quantum imprints in Hawking radiation or deterministic patterns in gravitational waves—lies beyond our current telescopes and particle colliders. Still, the quest itself reshapes our imagination.

QMM and CAI suggest something more intricate, perhaps more alive. They challenge us to see space-time not as a stage but as a participant—a memory or a machine. This shift ripples into our daily lives, urging us to question: Are we fleeting sparks in an indifferent cosmos, or are our lives woven into its very structure? Are we authors of our story, or are we characters in a script written by quantum cells or classical rules? 

When I look up to the stars, pondering our place, these theories make me lean towards a universe that is more than many have imagined—a reality that remembers, computes, and, in its own way, knows us. In moving beyond Einstein’s shadow, we glimpse a cosmos where our existence, our consciousness, is part of a story that never fades. But even here, I romanticize about what it means to be a Mensch – a conscious human being – because wherever my story came for and however much I can influence it. The realness of my actual experience of my story, my subjective nowism of a conscious experience, that no one can take away from me, and that still reminds me of the beauty and the wonder of this thing called life.

Singularity Paradox – Bridging The Gap Between Humanity and AI
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