Is there a limit to what the universe can remember?
Yes, because what a region can hold is set by the area of its boundary, and the largest boundary any observer has, the cosmic horizon, holds about 3.3 × 10¹²² units of memory. Double a region's radius and its volume grows eightfold while its memory grows fourfold, since everything learnable about a region crosses its surface. A square meter of boundary holds 9.6 × 10⁶⁸ units. The horizon's total comes from reading it twice, from outside by its area and from inside by the lasting public records observers can write and read back, and requiring agreement. That gives 3.3001 × 10¹²², four parts in a thousand below the 3.3129 × 10¹²² from the Planck satellite. The capacity fixes the cosmological constant, and since it never changes, any measured drift in dark energy would falsify it.
Also in Chapter 24: Why Does a Region's Memory Scale With Its Surface?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 29: Why 1/137, and Why Is There a Limit to What the Universe Can Remember?watch a universe make its own particles