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Did you know?
Most of the basic particles of sub-atomic physics have at least two modes of spin. Looking in their direction of travel, the spin of a particle can be either to the left or to the right. The exception is the neutrino, the tiny particles devoid of electrical potential referred to in the Urantia Papers that escape from a collapsing star (464). Neutrinos spin only to the left--and nobody knows why this is so.
Black holes are thermodynamic systems having both temperature and entropy. Entropy, besides being the measure of disorganization, is also the measure of information of a system. What is remarkable about a black hole is that its entropy is proportional to the area of its event horizon, the latter being the boundary of no-escape. Jacob Beckenstein discovered that there is a limit to the amount of information that may be contained inside a given region of space. Guess what? The limit is given by the entropy of the largest black hole that would fit into the region.
If you think that is a pretty useless piece of information, think again. A basic principle of modern physics is that the world is made up of fields. A field is something that can vary independently at the different points of space. Whether described by classical or quantum physics, a field can thus contain an infinite amount of information. But Beckenstein's discovery was that no space can contain an infinite amount of information.
Physics still has a long way to go to come up with a theory of everything. One need is to unify the large and the small, general relativity and quantum theory. One point of divergence is time. Relativity treats time as relational, determined from within the universe whereas quantum theory has it as absolute and determined from outside the system being studied. To find a solution has proved to be extremely difficult. One of the possibilities (that would seem to also cope with the problem of fields and the Beckenstein boundary) would be to have both space and time quantized--that is there would be a smallest possible unit of length and a smallest possible interval of time.
For reasons we do not have the space to go into, many physicists hope for a unified cosmological theory that would be relational and fully defined from within the system, in this case the whole universe. Such a theory needs to be able to explain a universe that is complex, probabilistic, and self-organizing.
Whether or not it is possible to explain our universe entirely from within the system is conjectural. Probably not, as the Urantia Papers indicate that the creation and control of energy flow emanates from outside the system--but is also under intelligent control from within the universe. It appears to be highly unlikely that such a system can ever be described satisfactorily solely from within, and certainly not for a universe treated as a closed system.
Reference
Smolin, L. "The Life of the Cosmos." (Oxford University Press, 1997)
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