Does Spacetime Have Memory?

“The map is not the territory.” How often have you heard that old saw? We pay lip service to the meme…but then we go right ahead and ignore it. Take memory, for example:

A family member once told me that the ‘meaning of life’ is making memories. He confuses the memory with the experience and perhaps the experience with the event: the map with the territory. Memory, as we typically use the word, refers to certain neuronal patterns in the brain that encode certain experiences (sensory, emotional, kinetic). 

Unless my family member holds a traditional Christian view of life after death (he doesn’t), his metaphysics makes no sense, IMHO. First of all, memories are just code that refers us to another place and time. The picture is woefully incomplete, often lacking in detail, and sometimes just plain wrong.

Furthermore, at best ‘making memories’ works “in the living years” but if memories are stored in neurons, it doesn’t work for the long haul. Quite simply, memory likely vanishes upon the death of the organism.

Unless Florian Neukart, the Chief Product Officer at Terra Quantum AG, and a Professor of Quantum Computing at Leiden University, is right! In an article dated June 16, 2025, Dr. Neukart proposed that spacetime itself has memory.

Dr. Neukart: “To understand my idea, you first need to know that I assume from the start that space-time isn’t a smooth, continuous fabric…but is instead made of extremely small, discrete cells, like an invisible grid at the deepest level of reality.”

This is a version of the ‘foam model’ of spacetime suggested by Planck. 

“This isn’t an entirely new idea in itself…but I build on this by describing how each of these space-time cells can act like a memory unit…The key is to realize that modern physics describes all particles and forces as excitations in quantum fields – mathematical structures that span space and time… 

“There is also a more emergent kind of quantum information at play that describes the relationship of each cell to the others – this isn’t held in any one cell, but in the sprawling network of relationships between them…

“This is where we return to black holes… Even when a black hole finally evaporates, its imprint on the space that surrounded it remains. Information doesn’t vanish after all – it’s just been stored somewhere we hadn’t thought to look… This mechanism allows space-time to store the information that falls into a black hole…

“My collaborators and I began to refer to this idea as the quantum memory matrix (QMM) framework… If space-time truly has a memory-like structure, then it should be able to store information from any of the four fundamental forces of nature… 

“We aren’t postulating new hypothetical particles or unseen dimensions, we are simply taking what we already know about quantum information and packaging it in a new structure…”

Of course, physicists are rightly skeptical of theories that cannot be tested. At first glance, QMM would seem to fall into that category. But not so fast… 

“Such a test can at least be simulated in an existing quantum computer… We began by taking a qubit, the quantum equivalent of a computer bit, in a known starting state and letting it evolve over time. This evolution was designed to simulate the way a cell of space-time would be imprinted with information as quantum fields wash over it. The question was: could our imprint operator accurately describe the qubit’s evolution?

“To test this, we measured the state of the qubit after it had evolved and then applied a reverse version of the imprint operator to see if this would describe the original state. We found that it did indeed do so, with an accuracy of about 90 per cent. 

“This wasn’t just a theoretical toy model. The imprint and retrieval protocols were grounded in QMM’s mathematical structure and translated directly into executable quantum circuits, validating the idea that memory-like behavior is physically modellable…

“The curvature of space-time in general relativity is influenced by mass and energy. In our framework, there is an extra ingredient that should also contribute to that curvature: the weight of information woven into space-time…

“Astronomers already know that the gravity of many galaxies seems to be stronger than would be expected based on their mass and rate of rotation alone. Lacking an explanation, they have invented a substance called dark matter to account for the difference. 

“However, no one knows what it might be. But perhaps my collaborators and I have stumbled upon the answer: could dark matter be information, stored across space-time in a way that generates gravitational pull?”

Dark matter is the 21st century version of the 19th century’s aether – everyone assumes it exists but nobody knows what it is or how to find it. If the phenomena currently attributed to dark matter can be explained more simply via information theory, it would be a big step forward for Cosmology.

But the implications of QMM go far beyond ‘the matter of dark matter’. What if the universe is a copy of itself? Redundancy built-in, perfected. An heir and a spare. What if everything that has ever happened is preserved ‘forever’ intact in the structure of spacetime? O Death, where is your dreadful countenance now?

Obviously, there is work to be done here. But superficially, QMM seems to be compatible with the idea that the universe is a hologram or that its underlying structure is fractal. It also conforms to the Gaia hypothesis, i.e. that the cosmos itself must be regarded as a whole (perhaps even as an organism) exceeding the mere sum of its component parts.

Of course, in a sense QMM just kicks the can down the road. It’s a very long road…but still, it leads to Rome. We have ‘saved’ individual events by encoding them in spacetime, but we haven’t saved spacetime (Rome) itself.

According to most current cosmologies, spacetime had a beginning (everywhen) and it will have an end (everywhere). And what happens to our cherished ‘memories’ then? Of course a number of general ideas, ranging from the purely physical to the richly theological, immediately come to mind. 

Incredibly, after realizing how ingeniously spacetime is engineered, I have confidence that we’ll find a context in which immortality (memory encoded in spacetime) becomes eternity (spacetime saved). Maybe it’s time for a new bumper sticker: Spacetime Saves now Save Spacetime!

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Wassily Kandinsky — Several Circles (1926) presents a dark, cosmic field punctuated by floating circles of varying size and color, evoking planets suspended in space. Kandinsky uses pure geometry and color relationships to suggest harmony, tension, and movement without reference to the physical world. The painting reflects his belief that abstract forms could express spiritual creation and the underlying order of the universe.