wolram said:
Is there a minimal amount of information that one could use to make a universe, is this what string theory tries to do,
One way to read this question might be:
How much choice is there in the fundamental laws of nature, and in the value of the fundamental constants they depend on?
In different terminology, this is an ancient question, not unrelated to the search for
ontological arguments , which tried to argue for the logical necessity of existence (of "god" in the terminology of those days) based only on pure logic. In the early 19th century Georg Hegel claimed a vast generalization of the ontological argument to metaphysics and eventually physics, claiming that from the assumption of, literally, nothingness, and following just a fundamental logical process of conceptual oppositions and unifications, first the metaphysical concepts and then eventually space, time, matter and then all the rest would emerge by logical necessity, from literal nothingness. Accordingly he called this the
Science of Logic .
(While, clearly Hegel's account remains vague and unsatisfactory from a modern perspective, it is striking which insights he did gain. For instance after he argues that and how space and time emerge from pure logic, next he claims to find that they must necessarily be able to transform into each other and form a unity., see
here )
While these deep considerations were mostly forgotten by the natural science community (and not appreciated for their scientific content by the philosophers) it indeed so happens that, back in the days of the 1980s, there was for a short but intensive while a meme alive that possibly string theory might give a way to see that, assuming just the principles of spacetime of stringy
S-matrices, then the space of choices for the universe might be close to being a singleton. This meme originated from the seminal article
Candelas-Horowitz-Strominger-Witten 85 on Calabi-Yau compactifications of string backgronds, and from the initial ignorance among string theorists about Calabi-Yau manifolds, resulting in the infamous initial idea that there might be only very few of them, each encoding one of a very small number of kinds of possible 4-dimensional "universes". The later surprise when the community as a whole realized that there are in general many possibilities for compactifications (a "
landscape" of them) has to be understood on the backdrop of this initial hope for a stringy version of the "ontological argument".
What has not been considered much is a systematic re-analysis, using modern mathematics and modern insights into fundamental physics, of the idea of Hegelian ontology. I have once tried to give such, laid out in
This starts with giving a mathematical formalization of something like Hegel's ontological
Proceß , then demonstrates that from this process the super-point emerges, and then demonstrates that from the super-point emerges spacetime, gravity, strings and branes (reviewed now in more detail
here). Notice that, besides some basic assumptions on how the process is to proceed, this is a sequence of mathematical theorems. It remains to see what exactly to make of these results, but the result itself is just a fact.