How Spacetime Memory Works

< 1000 words, < 5 minute read.

(This article is dedicated to John Timothy Donovan III who, 50+ years ago, suggested to me that spacetime could be a universal recording medium.)

In a recent post on this site we presented a theory advanced on June 16, 2025 by Florian Neukart, the Chief Product Officer at Terra Quantum AG, and a Professor of Quantum Computing at Leiden University, to wit: 

Spacetime has memory!

Dr. Neukart: “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…My collaborators and I began to refer to this idea as the quantum memory matrix (QMM) framework…”

QMM is a relatively simple theory with absolutely fantastic implications. As Dr. Neukart said, “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…”

Fantastic implications? Well, for one, QMM has the potential to simplify our thinking about two pressing problems in contemporary cosmology: black hole information and dark matter. (If I can make these problems go away for you, will you let me proceed in peace?)

Dr. Neukart: “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…” 

Information is conserved after all. Potentially, the black hole information paradox is solved. And dark matter?

“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… Could dark matter be information, stored across space-time in a way that generates gravitational pull?”

Dark matter is the 21^st century version of the 19^th century’s aether – everyone assumes it exists, but nobody knows what it is or how to find it. Until now! That’s QMM 2, Sceptics 0.

QMM may shed light on slightly less scientific topics as well: “Daddy, is there such a thing as ghosts?” Across millennia and around the globe, folks (e.g. Hamlet) attest to the immediate, local presence of things that should be far removed in space and/or time (his dad). 

What we ham-handedly call a ‘ghost’ may be our perception of traces of the past that have been encoded in the spacetime matrix. Under certain circumstances we can become aware, in varying degrees of detail, of these traces.

Sidebar:  According to traditional Christian eschatology, concrete awareness of people and events from the past, if any, comes only after death. In the Celtic tradition, on the other hand, certain times of day (twilight, dawn) and certain days of the year (solstices, equinoxes, but especially Samhain) are conducive to such contact. (Halloween and the Day of the Dead are roughly coincident with Samhain). 

Likewise, pilgrims are fond of visiting holy sites; perhaps they’re connecting with events that happened at those spots long ago. And it’s not just pilgrims. Rome is full of tourists anxious to share the thrill of early Christian martyrdom in the Colosseum. 

And not just public attractions. We each have our own ‘holy places’ – spots we revisit over and over again to ‘reconnect with ourselves’, to ‘recharge our batteries’. To us these spots are magical; they could be straight off of a David Hockney canvass. But when we point out that magic to others, they just stare at us, bewildered, “You see what?”

Nor need we look exclusively to the supernatural to see how spacetime memory may impact our experience. We experience Deja Vue, we have a 6th sense, we get hunches, gut feelings. Perhaps these are all micro-manifestations of spacetime memory.

Of course, a memory is not the thing remembered; it is a coded, edited, compressed version. Any copy inherently differs, at least infinitesimally, from what is being copied. A 1980’s commercial asked, “Is it live…or Memorex?” Exactly!

The inherent but infinitesimal displacement  between an event and our memory (copy) of that event could be what Jacques Derrida calls Differance, potentially the source of all consciousness, individual and/or universal.   

QMM is just hours old as a scientific theory. Yet the phenomenon it models was exhaustively described over 100 years ago by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past (RTP)…but with a crucial twist:

According to QMM, a common location may facilitate the simultaneous experience of events separated in time. According to RTP, a common experience may connect, here and now, locations separated in space and time.    

This anomaly is fortuitous. The fact that these relationships are apparently transitive and symmetrical gives QMM an added coat of plausibility.  

Finally, QMM seems consistent with the currently popular model of the universe as a hologram. At every point in space and on every plane of time, the universe is self-similar. Patterns recur across space and time and scale…like spacetime memory! 

We are used to major breakthroughs coming from supercomputers, satellite probes, telescopes, particle accelerators, etc. Or from a whole new physics…or mathematics. But what if it doesn’t have to be that way? Could an important new idea also be simple…and semi-obvious?

Sometimes, it’s not about seeing new things; sometimes it is a matter of seeing old things with new eyes. 

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The Enigma of the Hour - Giorgio de Chirico (1910–11) conveys a feeling of being stuck in time by presenting a motionless city square where the clock marks time without prompting any visible change or action. The frozen figures and oppressive stillness suggest an endless present, in which time exists as a symbol rather than a force that moves life forward.