Log24

I nodded. “You’d have no information. You need the broken symmetry, the shadow, to have information and information gives rise to the world. It from bit.”

I couldn’t help but grin with excitement. The message was clear: having a finite frame of reference creates the illusion of a world, but even the reference frame itself is an illusion. Observers create reality, but observers aren’t real. There is nothing ontologically distinct about an observer, because you can always find a frame in which that observer disappears: the frame of the frame itself, the boundary of the boundary.

“If physicists discover an invariant someday, the game will be up,” my father mused. “That would rule out the hypothesis that the universe is really nothing.”

That was true. But so far, at least, every last invariant had gone the way of space and time, rendered relative and observer-dependent. Spacetime, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, mass, energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, dimensions, particles, fields, the vacuum, strings, the universe, the multiverse, the speed of light— one by one they had been downgraded to illusion. As the surface appearance of reality fell away, only one thing remained. Nothing.