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Bentley MoonAn independent commonsFuturism Institute

Research

The Blackhole lab: when information is present but cannot be read

Information can be fully present and still unreadable. When does that happen, why, and what does reading it cost? Black-hole information theory is a well-developed physical treatment of that question. The lab studies them as physics, and uses them as a source of tools for keeping collectives of AI agents auditable, which is its long-range aim.

A working frame

The lab works with three axes, as a working hypothesis rather than a theorem. Location: is the information held in the parts of a system, or only in correlations between parts? Capacity: how much can move, limited by light cones in physics, by min-cuts (the narrowest set of links that separates one part of a network from another) in networks, and by bandwidth in agents. Mismatch: how well the reader’s model of the system fits the system.

Bounds that hold in one direction make the frame usable: each says what a reader cannot know, given a stated limit. The deepest open problem is that no law yet joins the three axes.

Scale of the record

  • 232 automatic reproduction checks, all passing; the full test suite has 675 tests (2026-10-13).
  • 18 pre-registered hypotheses, each with a file that records its prediction before the data.
  • 2 real gravitational-wave events analysed from public LIGO data.
  • 1 run on quantum hardware (IBM ibm_fez), with a second round pending.

How to read the claims

Claims on these pages carry two tags where the lab’s record assigns them. Confidence: proved, verified (an independent method or a reproduction), observed (one pre-registered method) or suggestive, and pending where nothing has been measured yet. Novelty: known (published by others first), narrow (the core is known and a stated part is the lab’s) or ours. A test that can fail in one direction only certifies its violations; when such a test passes, these pages say it passed, never that something was certified.

A Kerr black hole of spin 0.9 seen at 80 degrees, rendered by the lab: intensity, redshift, image order with the Bardeen curve, and the lensed sky.
A Kerr black hole of spin 0.9 seen at 80 degrees, rendered by the lab: intensity, redshift, image order with the Bardeen curve, and the lensed sky.
H-0008: the equatorial identity 1 − (γ_eq/π)² = R_kk/ω_θ², checked across light rings.
H-0008: the equatorial identity 1 − (γ_eq/π)² = R_kk/ω_θ², checked across light rings.
GW150914: the final mass and spin from the lab’s ringdown modes, against LIGO’s value.
GW150914: the final mass and spin from the lab’s ringdown modes, against LIGO’s value.
IBM ibm_fez run 1: measured results against predictions.
IBM ibm_fez run 1: measured results against predictions.