Behind the Horizon: The Invisible Vacuum and the Birth of Spacetime
A revolutionary new theory has emerged that challenges our understanding of the universe's origins. Instead of the traditional Big Bang model, this theory
proposes a white hole universe where information rather than energy, is the fundamental building block of reality. This groundbreaking idea introduces the
concept of a non-local vacuum, where time does not exist and information, in the form of quantum bits of probability, or qubits, are entangled.
Unlike the traditional Big Bang theory, this new model posits that the event horizon of a white hole is the true source of the observable
universe. As the white hole expands, its interior—the vacuum—is filled with entangled qubits, forming a vast network of information.
This information-theoretic approach is grounded in John Archibald Wheeler's assertion that information is the most fundamental
element of reality (“it from bit”).
One of the most fascinating aspects of this new model, called the Horizon Model, is its alignment with the theory of cosmic inflation. By calculating the
number of qubits required for the vacuum to have roughly the same energy density as the observable universe, the model predicts
an instantaneous inflation of the white hole horizon to a non-local size of 10
-26 meters before cosmic expansion began.
This remarkable finding offers a potential explanation for the widely accepted theory of cosmic inflation, which has long been
invoked to account for certain features of the observed cosmic microwave background.
Another significant aspect of this new model is its potential to resolve the longstanding Hubble tension. By introducing a new
cosmological parameter, P—the ratio of the vacuum energy density to the local energy density—this model offers a fresh perspective
on the discrepancy in observations of the universe's expansion rate at different points in time. Variations in P could provide a
more unified understanding of the universe's evolution.
Moreover, this novel model also offers a unique perspective on the enigmatic force known as dark energy as the non-local energy
that is driving the expansion of the white hole. Developing the physics of the non-local vacuum offers a promising path forward
in our ongoing quest to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos.
Publication history and status
March 29, 2019. An early version of the paper entitled
Horizon model of physical reality was submitted to the American Physical Society (APS) publication
Physical Review Research.
April 5, 2019. Editor Ling Miao rejected the paper on the grounds that "we do not think that it is suitable for publication in Physical Review X".
April 26, 2019. I began a rewrite of the paper with the title
HorizonModel.
August 7, 2019. I began the process of trying to find endorsements for the paper for publication in the
hep-th section of arXiv. I sent the request for endorsement
to a number of prominent physicists but got no responses.
September 17, 2019. The paper was submitted to
PRResearch. Editor Robert Rimmer immediately rejected the paper stating that it "it is not suited
for Physical Review Research. We make no judgment on the correctness of the work, only on its suitability according to our other criteria."
November 11, 2019 to February 18, 2020.. I sought the advice of several theorists at Los Alamos National Laboratory about the physics of the paper. The only feedback I got was,
essentially, "this is beyond my level of expertise".
April 20, 2020. After some rewriting I once again began the process of trying to find endorsements for the paper for publication this time in the
astro-ph.CO section of arXiv. Once again, I
sent the request for endorsement to a number of prominent physicists but got no responses.
September 17, 2021. I sent a link to the paper with an appeal to the chairman of the Physics Department at my alma mater of UC Berkeley. The appeal was a request for him to
find someone within the Department who might provide feedback about the suitability of the paper for publication. There was no response to my appeal.
February 3, 2024. Now 88 years old, I decided to make a final attempt at publishing the paper. I engaged
Editage Author Services for proofreading and general editing services. The paper
was retitled
Non-local Vacuum: a Door to New Physics.
February 21, 2024.Because of my history with APS I decided to try publishing in a journal of the
Institute of Physics (IOP) in the UK. The paper was rewritten to IOP
style requirements and submitted to
Reports on Progress in Physics (ROPP)".
February 27, 2024. Lucy Joy, an editor of IOP Publishing, rejected the paper saying " it does not meet the criteria for publication and wishing me well " should you decide to
publish your manuscript elsewhere."
February 28, 2024, I resubmitted the paper to another IOP publication
New Journal of Physics and the same Ms Lucy Joy immediately rejected the paper on similar
grounds.
May 5, 2024. After an appeal, Ms Joy kindly explained that "we felt that your reference list did not sufficiently demonstrate rigour and extensive research: without evidence
of careful consideration of the work against current and up-to-date research." In other words, the work seemed out of date. This was a completely justified position and
I concurred. This led me to undergo serious literature searches and rewriting to bring the paper up-to-date. Ms Joy and her team had done me a favor.
May 13, 2024. Editage Author Services completed an edit of the updated paper.
May 16, 2024. I tried once again submitting the now completely revised paper to an American Physical Society publication and submitted it to
Physical Review D.
And, once again, editor Robert Rimmer immediately rejected the paper citing the same grounds. I.e., that "it is not suitable for their journal...(He said) they make no judgment about
the quality of the work and recommended that I seek publication in a more specialized journal."
May 22, 2024. I, with the help of the Inflection Company's AI bot called Pi, did a journal search to find a journal that is a good match for my paper.
The journal search turned up a number of potentially suitable journals. Chief among them is the Springer Press journal
Foundations of Physics.
May 23, 2024 The paper was rewritten in the style suitable for publication by the Springer Press and submitted for publication by
Foundations of Physics.
May 25, 2024.
Foundations of Physics has accepted my paper for publication pending peer review. At Last!!.
June 9, 2024.The paper went under peer review by
Foundations of Physics.
July 20, 2024. The editors of
Foundations of Physics informed me that the first review report had been generated and the paper has now been
assigned for a second review process. Once that process is completed, the paper will be submitted for final decision. So, we wait.
August 10. 2024. I received the following email from
Foundations of Physics.
Dear Dr Hill
Your manuscript "Non-local Vacuum: A Door to New Physics" has now been assessed. I am attaching the reports below.
Regrettably, given the reports, I am not in the position to accept your manuscript for publication in Foundations of Physics on this occasion.
Thank you for the opportunity to review your work. I'm sorry that we cannot be more positive on this occasion and hope you will not be deterred from submitting
future work to Foundations of Physics.
Kind regards,
Francesco Buscemi
Editor
Foundations of Physics
Reviewer Comments:
Reviewer 1
Hello,
Thanks for submitting to Foundations of Physics. The proposed model is interesting with relevance to the emergent spacetime program, but there were a few
technical and clarity issues that held the paper back.
The reviewer was unable to understand how the claims in the abstract, namely the resolution of the cosmological constant problem and the Hubble tension, clearly follow
from the computations. A short footnote (2) describes a solution to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which should be expanded upon. The resolution of the Hubble
tension in Section 3 might implicitly utilize a change in the energy density of the observable universe to compute a changed Hubble rate, according to Fig. 2.
If the NLV is flat as suggested, then it should likely have $\Omega_{NLV}=1$, which seems incompatible with $P>1$.
We suggest stronger connection with modern quantum gravity and cosmology tools. In particular, complete conformal diagrams would be very helpful.
The reviewers look forward to a revised version that could be accepted in a different journal.
Reviewer 2
In this paper the author proposes a cosmological model meant to calculate cosmological observables such as the Hubble constant. The calculations seem to be based on combining algebraic equations from various physics theories, rather than being derived from first principles in some new theory. (Or, if a new theory of first principles is being used here, then it is not sufficiently explained or substantiated.) For this reason the interpretations given to the model seem to be qualitative and less than fully justified. Relatedly, many of the key concepts attributed to the theory such as "non-local vacuum" and "creation of spacetime" are used without proper mathematical definitions. Moreover, since formulas are taken from various theories such as GR, holography, QM, etc, it is not clear in which sense terms like "white hole" or "horizon" should be defined. All in all, the presentation of the theory is too vague and relies on too many undefined words. I assume that the numerical calculations are correct although I did not scrutinize them in detail. For the reasons mentioned above, my opinion is that this article is not suitable for publication in the present form.
August 13, 2024. I sent the following response to the reviewer reports:
Dear Francesco Buscemi,
First and foremost I want to sincerely thank the Foundations of Physics for deciding to submit my manuscript "Non-local Vacuum: A Door to New Physics" to peer review.
I am not a member of the theoretical physics community and the paper is not intended as a professional theoretical physics paper. I am an 88 year old experimentalist, at the end of my career, and in no position to pursue a career as a theorist. The paper presents a simple conceptual idea in the form of a new cosmological model. I was hoping that peer review would establish that: a) the model is not in conflict with any observations that I may not be aware of; and, b) that the model is, or, can be made, compatible with General Relativity (GR). If the model, that I call the Horizon Model (HM), was to fail either of these tests, I would abandon the project immediately. My confidence in pursuing publication of the model stems from the fact that it has observational credibility that also renders it falsifiable. Namely, the model predicts the existence and magnitude (with errors) of cosmic inflation in agreement with results deduced from current analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Neither reviewer acknowledged or commented on this important consequence of the model.
The paper appears to have some clarity issues that need to be addressed. I say this because neither reviewer seems to have understood the basic nature of the model. Reviewer 1 states that they were "unable to understand how the claims in the abstract, namely the resolution of the cosmological constant problem and the Hubble tension, clearly follow from the computations."
The cosmological constant (vacuum catastrophe) problem stems from the fact that the theoretical value for the ubiquitous vacuum energy density differs from the ΛCDM (experimental) value for the energy density of the observable universe by more than 10x120!
The model simply eliminates this problem by assuming that the two densities should be approximately equal. It accomplishes this by hypothesizing that the vacuum is the interior of an expanding
white hole that is filled with Iq Planck sized binary qubits. Equation (4) of the paper shows that the energy density of the vacuum, inversely proportional to Iq,
is equal to the ΛCDM value for ρcrit when Iq =1.78x10121. The HM is tied to observation by comparing this number to Egan and Lineweaver's published estimate of the amount
of entropy/information currently in the observable universe, ~4.5x10104 bits. This comparison leads to the conclusion that for every bit of information in the observable universe
there are ~ 4x1016 qubits in the vacuum. A basic feature of the model is that time (and, therefore, spacetime) and the local bits of information emerge from the vacuum (white hole)
horizon. At t=0, when the first bit of local spacetime emerged, the Schwartzchild radius of the white hole containing 4x1016 qubits is ~6.5x10-27 m. This is in excellent
agreement with the theory of cosmic inflation that requires the size of the "inflaton" to be >5x10-27 m, The details of the model's predictions of the state of the "inflaton" are listed in table 2 of the paper.
The principle objections raised by Reviewer 2 are that the paper does not present a theory derivable from first principles and that "the interpretations given to the model seem to be qualitative and less than fully justified." As stated above, this not a theoretical paper and I felt no obligation to provide a mathematical definition of things like an event horizon or non-locality. But I am baffled by the reviewer's characterization of the HM as qualitative. This ignores the quantitative predictions of cosmic inflation that also renders the model falsifiable. Every equation used for quantitative analysis is derived within the paper and every quantitative result is ascribed a one sigma uncertainty. I realize this is not typical of theoretical papers but, as an experimentalist, I feel obligated to associate an uncertainty with every quoted numerical result.
The bottom line of both reviewers is that the paper is not suitable for publication in Foundations of Physics in its present form. I think my choice of Foundations of Physics as a potential publisher of this paper is justified because of its stated mission of "providing a forum for discussing the conceptual structures and foundational aspects" of physics. I was particularly confident of this choice after learning that Carlo Rovelli is the editor-in-chief. This is a man who literally wrote the book on white holes, who understands the role of imagination and acknowledges that advancement in science sometimes comes from mind traveling as opposed to incremental additions to the status quo. My mind travel was down a world line toward t=0 until I arrived at the first Planck region emanating from the Big Bang singularity and realizing that I could go no further. I had reached the limits of observation that I eventually realized must be the horizon of a white hole. Conventional theoretical physics has spent decades trying to understand what's going on inside that first Planck region without any hope of observational confirmation all the while ignoring the hugely embarrassing vacuum catastrophe problem. If HM passes both the tests listed above, I believe HM deserves to be presented to the theoretical community as a possible solution to the vacuum catastrophe problem and an explanation for cosmic inflation. The door to new physics opened by HM includes the physics of white hole expansion and its relationship to dark energy and how a massive network of quantum entangled qubits could produce the emergence of gravity and spacetime from the white hole horizon.
I would very much appreciate your advice, and, if possible, that of Dr. Rovelli, of how I might best pursue introduction of the HM to the theoretical community. In spite of the fact that the reviewers do not seem to have understood the HM, are they right that the Foundations of Physics is not the appropriate journal for its publication? Is the basic problem the clarity of my presentation so that I should consider the formidable task of a re-write? Should I consider publication of the paper in another journal and, if so, do you have any recommendations for which publications I should consider?
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this response. Since I am not sure how to proceed, I am eagerly awaiting and will be extremely grateful for your advice.
Yours sincerely,
Roger Hill
August 30, 2024. Today I sent the following email to Carlo Rovelli, the Editor-in-Chief of
Foundations of Physics.
Ref: Submission ID 58e169e0-314b-4dc3-9876-a1b664fb9109 to the Foundations of Physics.
Dear Carlo Rovelli,
I am writing to you in your capacity as Editor-in-Chief of Foundations of Physics. I am hoping that, in accordance with the policy of the journal, you will rule on a
disputed editorial decision to reject publication of my paper, Non-local Vacuum: A Door to New Physics. This paper presents a new cosmological model
that asserts that 4D spacetime emerges from the horizon of an expanding white hole and that the interior of the white hole is non-local vacuum. In
accordance with John Wheeler's understanding of "it from bit", the vacuum is assumed to be filled with Planck sized binary qubits in sufficient numbers
to equilibrate (approximately) the vacuum energy density and that of the observable universe: eliminating the so-called vacuum catastrophe. The vacuum is,
essentially, timeless Euclidean space. The numerics of the model lead to the prediction that at t=0 the white hole had a size of ~10-26 m in excellent
agreement with the requirements of cosmic inflation theory. The resolution of the Hubble tension follows from allowing the ratio of the non-local and local
energy densities, P, to vary slightly from 1. Exact agreement with the SH0ES measurement results when P=1.16±0.03.
The editor's decision to reject was based on the reports of 2 reviewers. My dispute is based on the fact that neither reviewer appears to have understood the basic nature
of the model. Neither reviewer acknowledged the verifiable prediction of cosmic inflation: one of the most important consequences of the model. Reviewer 1
explicitly says they were unable to understand the resolution of the vacuum catastrophe problem or the Hubble tension. They defended their problem with the
Hubble tension by saying Euclidean space cannot have P>1. But the connection between geometry and energy density is established by the Friedman equations of
4D GR and the paper explicitly states that the vacuum is outside spacetime and therefore GR does not apply to P. Reviewer 1 wanted me to expand on on a footnote
as a "solution" to the 2nd law. All the footnote said was that the indestructibly of information/entropy is the origin of the 2nd law. Isn't it obvious that if
information/entropy is indestructible the quantity in a closed system can not decrease? Reviewer 2 complained that the paper was not a proper theoretical paper
with the theory presented from first principles and all terms like white hole and horizon being defined mathematically. This is not a theoretical paper, I am not
a theorist nor do I have any ambitions to become one. I am an experimentalist trying to present a simple conceptual/numerical model to the theoretical community
for their appraisal. I believe the model has value and deserves to be considered and I think Foundations of Physics under your leadership (I've seen a number of
your YouTube lectures) is the right place to publish.
Sincerely yours,
Roger Hill
P.S. My original response to the reviewers was sent to Associate Editor Francesco Buscemi on August 13, 2024. I have not yet received a reply.
Carlo Rovelli answered the next day (August 31,2024).
Dear Roger Hill,
I am sorry to disappoint you. FoP is not meant to publish incomplete suggestions for new physical theories. There are too many of these.
Apologies,
Carlo Rovelli
He obviously hadn't had time to read the paper or, perhaps, not even my appeal. He endorsed the decision to reject publication on the basis that
the paper did not present a complete theory. Of course it didn't: it's a numerical/conceptual model not a mathematical theory. As you can see, he made
no comment about the physics, correctness or consequences
of the model.
September 10, 2024. I have submitted the paper to the journal
Classical and Quantum Gravity. This may be a more appropriate journal since their readership
is very broad and they publish experimental papers as well as theoretical treatises.
September 17, 2024. Georgia Stevens, an associate editor of
Classical and Quantum Gravity has rejected my paper for publication on the grounds that "it does not
meet our publication criteria." Again, not a word about the physics or the fact that it makes an important prediction about cosmic inflation that is experimentally verified.
Perhaps it's time to give up on this project. I clearly don't speak the language of theoretical physicists and my ability to access current scientific literature is financially
limited to what is available in open source publications. The logical conclusion is that I need to find a collaborator who is an institutionally connected theoretical physicist
who would be interested in further developing the Horizon Model.
November 21, 2024. I have completely rewritten the paper in a style suitable for publication in Physical Review Letters. It is now titled: "Cosmic inflation from entangled qubits: a white hole model for
emergent spacetime."
November 25, 2024. The paper was submitted to the editors of PRL.
on November 27, 2024 I received the following rejection from PRL.
Re: LY18647
Cosmic inflation from entangled qubits: A white hole model for
emergent spacetime
by Roger Eugene Hill
Dear Dr. Hill,
Your manuscript has been considered. We regret to inform you that we
have concluded that it is not suitable for publication in Physical
Review Letters.
Yours sincerely,
Nikhil Karthik
Associate Editor
Physical Review Letters
Email: prl@aps.org
https://journals.aps.org/prl/
November 29, 2024. The paper was submitted to the editors of
European Physical Journal Plus.
.
.
I presented a 10 minute talk on April 25, 2023 at the Virtual April Meeting of the American Physical Society in a session entitled
"Cosmology and the CMB". The talk is entitled "The Non-local Vacuum, A Framework for New Physics" and presents the essence of the Horizon Model.
Copyright © 2009 - 2024 Roger E. Hill. All rights reserved.
Contact: roger.hill.nm@gmail.com