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The recent death of Robert Redford was a reminder of just how much All the President’s Men unsettled old certainties about American democracy. An exposé of the Watergate scandal of 1972 (when members of the campaign to re-elect Richard Nixon were caught planting secret recording devices at the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate building), Alan J. Pakula’s film fed into an increasing sense that the institutions of American governance were riddled with corruption.

Maybe not everyone agreed with Pakula’s dark vision. But he was not alone. Over the years since, Oliver Stone could also be relied on to make state-of-the-nation cinema, as could Martin Scorsese – or before them, Frank Capra. Such films attempted to capture, usually to critique, the national mood at that moment in time.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, suggests that there is still a place for challenging filmmaking in today’s culture. Along with the recently released Eddington by director Ari Aster, these new state-of-the-nation films explore an America that is in crisis and throw it in our faces in staggering, epic narratives.

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Both films speak to the chaos of a social order that is falling apart. Both, but particularly Eddington, also threaten to be so overwhelmed by this chaos that they end up by falling into incoherence.

The term, “incoherence”, is not chosen at random. One of the seminal texts for film scholars of the 1980s was Robin Wood’s The Incoherent Text, Narrative in the 70s. Looking back at a series of films from this decade, Wood argued that “here, incoherence is no longer hidden and esoteric: the films seem to crack open before our eyes”. These two films do much the same, exposing through chaos something incomprehensible about our times and falling into incoherence in the process.

Set during the pandemic in a desert town, Eddington hurls itself from one flashpoint to the next. The sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) refuses to wear a mask and this apparently minor infraction soon pits him against his old enemy and competitor in love, Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Borrowing from Maga-style campaigning, Cross enters the election as candidate for new mayor.

At home, Cross is living with his conspiracy theory-loving mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell). His wife Louise (Emma Stone) is retreating further into mental illness and isolation.

On the edges of this, a mysterious conglomerate is building a data centre just outside of town. Race riots are also breaking out following the George Floyd killing. But there is much more to come.

Director Ari Aster could hardly have dreamed up more issues than he does here. With so much weight piling onto the narrative, Eddington concludes with an extended shoot-out that tips an already over-extended film into terminal disarray.

One Battle After Another, like Eddington, is a truly American film. Where Aster shot his neo-western in classic Panavision, Anderson goes one further, following The Brutalist in creating a VistaVision print, a format that is best experienced on a 70mm screen. These formats hark back to Hollywood’s grandiose epics of the 1950s, adding to the films’ evocation of history – both filmic and social.

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A further historical layering is Anderson’s source material for One Battle, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. Anderson updates Vineland’s kaleidoscopic exhumation of the revolutionary movements of the 60s by casting his ageing hippie hero, now called Bob (Leonardo di Caprio), as a relic of a fictional noughties brigade, the French 75. Led by his lover Perfidia Beverley Hills (Teyana Taylor), they robbed banks, bombed buildings and liberated detention centres in the name of their ideology of “free borders, free choices, free from fear”.

Left to bring up their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) as a single parent, Bob spends his days off-grid unshaven, smoking weed, and watching the classic political drama, The Battle of Algiers. All is (somewhat) well until the brutal army veteran, Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who believes himself to be Willa’s real father, barrels back into their lives in pursuit of his “daughter”.

In common with Eddington, One Battle is at heart a family melodrama. It draws on the classic tropes of bad versus good father and conflicted mother, questioning the legitimacy of the family unit. On to these narratives bones, Anderson grafts a vision of a post-Obama America in thrall to shadowy corporate interests, a legacy of rounding up and deporting immigrants, and an old white male order hell-bent on its own agenda of personal revenge.

Robin Wood concluded his thoughts on American cinema of the 70s with the prognosis that in their incoherence they pointed to one inescapable solution: the logical necessity for radicalism.

Aster and Anderson have looked radicalism in the eye and dismissed it as yet another failed ideology. Neither names the forces behind their vision of the end of American democracy and, to be fair, the current political crisis postdates both films’ completion in early 2024.

Where Aster sees only bloodshed and impotence, Anderson clings on to a fragile utopianism that in the present day is as unlikely as it is consoling. After the lights have gone up, it may well be that what his film leaves behind is its terrifying imagery of detention centres and the horror of immigrant round-ups. It is this certainly that led Steven Spielberg to acclaim “this insane movie” as more relevant than Anderson could ever have imagined.

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For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein’s general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time.

Quantum mechanics governs the world of particles and fields. Both work brilliantly in their own domains. But put them together and contradictions appear – especially when it comes to black holes, dark matter, dark energy and the origins of the cosmos.

My colleagues and I have been exploring a new way to bridge that divide. The idea is to treat information – not matter, not energy, not even spacetime itself – as the most fundamental ingredient of reality. We call this framework the quantum memory matrix (QMM).

At its core is a simple but powerful claim: spacetime is not smooth, but discrete – made of tiny “cells”, which is what quantum mechanics suggests. Each cell can store a quantum imprint of every interaction, like the passage of a particle or even the influence of a force such as electromagnetism or nuclear interactions, that passes through. Each event leaves behind a tiny change in the local quantum state of the spacetime cell.

In other words, the universe does not just evolve. It remembers.

The story begins with the black hole information paradox. According to relativity, anything that falls into a black hole is gone forever. According to quantum theory, that is impossible. Information cannot be ever destroyed.

QMM offers a way out. As matter falls in, the surrounding spacetime cells record its imprint. When the black hole eventually evaporates, the information is not lost. It has already been written into spacetime’s memory.

This mechanism is captured mathematically by what we call the imprint operator, a reversible rule that makes information conservation work out. At first, we applied this to gravity. But then we asked: what about the other forces of nature? It turns out they fit the same picture.

In our models assuming that spacetime cells exist, the strong and weak nuclear forces, which hold atomic nuclei together, also leave traces in spacetime. Later, we extended the framework to electromagnetism (although this paper is currently being peer reviewed). Even a simple electric field changes the memory state of spacetime cells.

Explaining dark matter and dark energy

That led us to a broader principle that we call the geometry-information duality. In this view, the shape of spacetime is influenced not just by mass and energy, as Einstein taught us, but also by how quantum information is distributed, especially through entanglement. Entanglement is a quantum feature in which two particles, for example, can be spookily connected, meaning that if you change the state of one, you automatically and immediately also change the other – even if it’s light years away.

This shift in perspective has dramatic consequences. In one study, currently under peer review, we found that clumps of imprints behave just like dark matter, an unknown substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe. They cluster under gravity and explain the motion of galaxies – which appear to orbit at unexpectedly high speeds – without needing any exotic new particles.

In another, we showed how dark energy might emerge too. When spacetime cells are saturated, they cannot record new, independent information. Instead, they contribute to a residual energy of spacetime. Interestingly, this leftover contribution has the same mathematical form as the “cosmological constant”, or dark energy, which is making the universe expand at an accelerated rate.

Its size matches the observed dark energy that drives cosmic acceleration. Together, these results suggest that dark matter and dark energy may be two sides of the same informational coin.

A cyclic universe?

But if spacetime has finite memory, what happens when it fills up? Our latest cosmological paper, accepted for publication in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, points to a cyclic universe – being born and dying over and over. Each cycle of expansion and contraction deposits more entropy – a measure of disorder – into the ledger. When the bound is reached, the universe “bounces” into a new cycle.

Reaching the bound means spacetime’s information capacity (entropy) is maxed out. At that point, contraction cannot continue smoothly. The equations show that instead of collapsing to a singularity, the stored entropy drives a reversal, leading to a new phase of expansion. This is what we describe as a “bounce”.

By comparing the model to observational data, we estimate that the universe has already gone through three or four cycles of expansion and contraction, with fewer than ten remaining. After the remaining cycles are completed, the informational capacity of spacetime would be fully saturated. At that point, no further bounces occur. Instead, the universe would enter a final phase of slowing expansion.

That makes the true “informational age” of the cosmos about 62 billion years, not just the 13.8 billion years of our current expansion.

So far, this might sound purely theoretical. But we have already tested parts of QMM on today’s quantum computers. We treated qubits, the basic units of quantum computers, as tiny spacetime cells. Using imprint and retrieval protocols based on the QMM equations, we recovered the original quantum states with over 90% accuracy.

This showed us two things. First, that the imprint operator works on real quantum systems. Second, it has practical benefits. By combining imprinting with conventional error-correction codes, we significantly reduced logical errors. That means QMM might not only explain the cosmos, but also help us build better quantum computers.

QMM reframes the universe as both a cosmic memory bank and a quantum computer. Every event, every force, every particle leaves an imprint that shapes the evolution of the cosmos. It ties together some of the deepest puzzles in physics, from the information paradox to dark matter and dark energy, from cosmic cycles to the arrow of time.

And it does so in a way that can already be simulated and tested in the lab. Whether QMM proves to be the final word or a stepping stone, it opens a startling possibility: the universe may not only be geometry and energy. It is also memory. And in that memory, every moment of cosmic history may still be written.

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There are lots of good reasons not to eat meat or dairy products. It might be for your health or for the sake of the environment. Or you might have moral concerns about consuming animals.

Yet many of us continue to eat meat, especially men, who eat more of it than women, and are less likely to opt for a vegetarian or vegan diet.

So is there a link between meat consumption and perceptions of masculinity? Does the mindset of the prehistoric caveman hunter live on in today’s restaurants and weekend barbecues?

To explore this idea, my colleagues and I conducted a survey of more than 1,000 men in the UK, which revealed that social ideas involving “avoidance of femininity” and status were indeed linked to higher levels of meat-eating and a notion that meat is masculine.

The survey showed that those sympathetic to traditional masculine norms consumed more red meat and poultry, and were less keen to part from the meat and dairy in their diet. We then followed up with some of the men who had high levels of “meat attachment” to join an online discussion, and used remotely moderated focus groups to listen in on their conversations about their diets.

So what did they talk about?

More often than not, men were reluctant to talk about the role of gender in meat consumption, or completely rejected the notion that there was any link, with one participant in his thirties saying: “I don’t think gender influences what I eat at all. If there’s something I want [to eat] I’ll just have it.”

He went on: “There’s no such thing as a manly or womanly dish if you ask me. It’s just food, so it’s literally got zero influence on whether I’d eat something or not.”

For others, the relationship between meat and masculinity was more complex. Some men noted for example that the women in their lives were more likely to reduce their meat consumption.

One man in his forties, said: “I live with five women and most of them would happily not eat meat at all. Also [the female] partners of quite a lot of my friends don’t eat a lot of meat. They would happily eat no meat at all. Whereas all of us [men], you know, we like our meat.”

For others, the link between meat and masculinity was explicit, with meat consumption linked to status within social groups. John, in his forties, commented on the obligation he sometimes feels when dining with what he called “alpha males” to “always go for a meat dish or a steak or something like that”.

He added: “Maybe I feel a slight obligation to go down [the meat] route sort of subconsciously. I’ve probably felt I need to have a steak here or need to have something that [perhaps] shows my masculinity.

“I feel sort of safer behind choosing something like that rather than, say, a pasta or a salad-based dish.”

What’s at stake?

We also found mention of an idea revealed in other research which describes meat being commonly understood in terms of “four Ns”: “natural”, “normal”, “necessary” and “nice”. These kinds of values came up in our groups’ discussions, but rarely applied to discussions of plant-based meat and dairy alternatives, which men seemed to consider “unnatural”, “insufficient” and “not nice”.

One participant in his twenties commented: “Chicken will just say ‘chicken’ on the back, whereas a plant-based [alternative to chicken] would have something like glycolic acid or something. I have no idea what that is.”

Another man commented: “I think if you switched maybe most of the time or full time to plant based diets, would you be missing out on certain nutrients?”

A fellow meat eater added: “The meat alternative options never taste very nice.

“I’ve always found that they just taste really bland [and] it’s an unusual texture.”

It was difficult for many of the men in our groups to imagine consuming a fully plant-based diet. They often spoke of extreme or specific situations as the only situations in which they would consider doing so.

“I’d need the doctor to tell me you’ve got six months [to live],” said one man in his fifties.

Another in his forties explained: “It would only really be health-related stuff. If someone said to me you’re gonna have to [cut down on meat] or it’s going to knock years off your life.”

One participant in the 18-29 age bracket said a meat diet was heavily linked to his social life where his friends relied on meat for protein because of their fitness regimes.

He said: “I would have to change my friends [if I stopped eating meat]. Basically, I have friends who are gym rats, who love to go to the gym together, who love to do strength training. So I would have to change my friends to people who are probably agriculturists – and have more interest in plants.”

These and many other contributions led us to conclude that men can have a mixed –and often contradictory – understanding of the role of gender in their food choices. And while our survey data reveals a strong link between masculinity and diet, our focus group data casts doubt on whether men are generally aware of this connection.