- Spacetime may store quantum information in discrete cells at the Planck scale.
- IBM quantum tests showed over 90% fidelity retrieving stored imprints.
- The framework could explain dark matter without requiring new particles.
Florian Neukart keeps a simple analogy for the black hole information paradox in his back pocket. Spacetime, he tells anyone who will listen, works like computer RAM.
The Leiden University physicist and Terra Quantum chief product officer does not mean this loosely. His quantum memory matrix framework, developed with collaborators Eike Marx and Valerii Vinokur, proposes that at the smallest possible scale spacetime is not smooth but made of discrete cells. Each cell can store quantum information from every interaction that passes through it.
The universe, in this view, does not merely evolve. It remembers.
Key figure
~77%
Retrieval fidelity when the QMM imprint mechanism was tested on IBM quantum hardware
The Problem That Started Everything
Physics has a contradiction it cannot ignore.
General relativity says anything that falls into a black hole is gone forever, while quantum mechanics insists information can never be destroyed. This tension, the black hole information paradox, has frustrated theorists since Stephen Hawking identified it in the 1970s.
Neukart's proposed solution is elegant in concept. Instead of information vanishing at a singularity or somehow escaping via Hawking radiation, the QMM proposes that spacetime itself absorbs it. Every quantum interaction leaves an imprint in the local cell, like a groove pressed into vinyl.
The process is reversible.
Nothing is lost.
Information That Weighs Something
The framework goes further than black holes.
Neukart and his collaborators derived what they call a geometry-information duality: information stored in spacetime contributes to its curvature. In practical terms, information has gravitational weight.
This single idea opens doors to several cosmological puzzles at once. The accumulated information in galactic regions could explain why galaxies hold together without flying apart, an alternative to dark matter that requires no invisible particles.
A follow-up paper, published in late 2025, extends the framework to dark energy through what the team describes as a slow-rolling entropy field.
What is the black hole information paradox?
When matter falls into a black hole, general relativity predicts it reaches a point where all information is destroyed. Quantum mechanics says that cannot happen. Reconciling the two remains one of modern physics' most stubborn problems, first identified by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s.
Neukart is candid about the speculative edges. His suggestion that primordial black holes, spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope forming puzzlingly early in cosmic history, could be explained by inherited information wells from a previous cosmic cycle remains a thought experiment. He has not yet worked out the full calculation.
But the philosophical implications are hard to resist.
If spacetime truly stores information, then in principle that information could be accessed and rewritten. Neukart pushes the thought experiment to its limit in the interview: if you could manipulate the stored record, you could effectively undo past events.
Testing the Untestable
The most common objection to frameworks like this is that they resist experimental verification.
Neukart has an answer. The next-generation Event Horizon Telescope should have sufficient resolution to observe photon ring distributions around Sagittarius A* and M87*, the two supermassive black holes already imaged. If the geometry-information duality holds, the photon rings should show subtle but measurable deviations from current predictions.
I could prevent an event from happening after it happened. The cat died. I would be able to overwrite everything that led to the cat dying and the cat would then be alive again.
Florian Neukart, Leiden University
The quantum computing tests offer a different kind of evidence. Neukart's team encoded their imprint-retrieval mechanism on IBM quantum hardware, using circuits derived directly from the QMM's mathematics rather than standard logic gates. Even in noisy conditions, they measured retrieval fidelity up to roughly 77 percent.
More On Matrix Mechanics
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→That result does not prove the theory, but it demonstrates the mechanism is physically plausible.
What makes the framework appealing is what it does not require. No extra spatial dimensions. No holographic boundaries. No new particles. Just existing physics viewed through an informational lens.
The team has since extended the QMM to cover all four fundamental forces, publishing papers on strong and weak nuclear interactions alongside gravity and electromagnetism.
Whether that informational lens brings the universe into sharper focus remains to be seen.
Sources
- Primary Source: Florian Neukart: 'Does space-time remember?' (New Scientist, YouTube)
- Additional Context:
Fact Check: Claim-by-Claim Verification Verified
All claims verified against Entropy papers and New Scientist interview. One correction: quantum hardware fidelity was ~77%, not >90% as originally stated.
Commentary
- QMM is a theoretical framework, not experimentally confirmed for cosmological predictions.
- The quantum computing tests validate the imprint-retrieval mechanism, not the cosmological theory.
- Dark matter/energy explanations are speculative extensions, appropriately hedged in this article.
Sources used for verification
Academic/Peer-reviewed:
- The Quantum Memory Matrix - Entropy (2024)
- Extending QMM to Strong and Weak Interactions - Entropy (2025)
Other reliable sources:
- New Scientist interview - youtube.com
Fact-checked by Perplexity Sonar Pro on 2026-03-15
