Is Earth a Hologram?

xxMESTxx · 11-07-2011, 12:28 AM

I know this may seem a bit crazy, but it's definitely interesting to think about. If you want you can read the full story here:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-hologram.html

Quote:

"...For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.
If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The "holographic principle" challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Susskind and 't Hooft's remarkable idea was motivated by ground-breaking work on black holes by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely "black" but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox.
Bekenstein's work provided an important clue in resolving the paradox. He discovered that a black hole's entropy - which is synonymous with its information content - is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. This is the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for infalling matter or light. Theorists have since shown that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates.

Crucially, this provides a deep physical insight: the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole - not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram. Susskind and 't Hooft extended the insight to the universe as a whole on the basis that the cosmos has a horizon too - the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe. What's more, work by several string theorists, most notably Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has confirmed that the idea is on the right track. He showed that the physics inside a hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is the same as the physics taking place on the four-dimensional boundary.

No one - including Hogan - is yet claiming that GEO600 has found evidence that we live in a holographic universe. It is far too soon to say. "There could still be a mundane source of the noise," Hogan admits.

Gravitational-wave detectors are extremely sensitive, so those who operate them have to work harder than most to rule out noise. They have to take into account passing clouds, distant traffic, seismological rumbles and many, many other sources that could mask a real signal. "The daily business of improving the sensitivity of these experiments always throws up some excess noise," says Danzmann. "We work to identify its cause, get rid of it and tackle the next source of excess noise." At present there are no clear candidate sources for the noise GEO600 is experiencing. "In this respect I would consider the present situation unpleasant, but not really worrying."
However Danzmann is cautious about Hogan's proposal and believes more theoretical work needs to be done. "It's intriguing," he says. "But it's not really a theory yet, more just an idea." Like many others, Danzmann agrees it is too early to make any definitive claims. "Let's wait and see," he says. "We think it's at least a year too early to get excited."

So what would it mean it if holographic noise has been found? Cramer likens it to the discovery of unexpected noise by an antenna at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1964. That noise turned out to be the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang fireball. "Not only did it earn Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson a Nobel prize, but it confirmed the big bang and opened up a whole field of cosmology," says Cramer.
Hogan is more specific. "Forget Quantum of Solace, we would have directly observed the quantum of time," says Hogan. "It's the smallest possible interval of time - the Planck length divided by the speed of light."

More importantly, confirming the holographic principle would be a big help to researchers trying to unite quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity. Today the most popular approach to quantum gravity is string theory, which researchers hope could describe happenings in the universe at the most fundamental level. But it is not the only show in town. "Holographic space-time is used in certain approaches to quantising gravity that have a strong connection to string theory," says Cramer. "Consequently, some quantum gravity theories might be falsified and others reinforced."

Hogan agrees that if the holographic principle is confirmed, it rules out all approaches to quantum gravity that do not incorporate the holographic principle. Conversely, it would be a boost for those that do - including some derived from string theory and something called matrix theory. "Ultimately, we may have our first indication of how space-time emerges out of quantum theory." As serendipitous discoveries go, it's hard to get more ground-breaking than that."

Numinous · 11-07-2011, 04:24 AM

Ugh, I really hate articles with sensationalist titles just to attract the laymen into a disappointment.

This only concerns quantum physics and their relation to Einsteinian astrophysics and if it's confirmed, I don't see anything but the fields I mentioned being shaken.

stubborn_d0nkey · 11-18-2011, 05:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Numinous

Ugh, I really hate articles with sensationalist titles just to attract the laymen into a disappointment.

This only concerns quantum physics and their relation to Einsteinian astrophysics and if it's confirmed, I don't see anything but the fields I mentioned being shaken.

Dont forget the new cults and religions that would be made stating that our universe is just a big computer program.

xxMESTxx · 11-07-2011, 09:03 AM

My bad, I found it to be an interesting read, and something fun to think about for a few minutes. I'll work on the title next time.

Numinous · 11-07-2011, 12:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by xxMESTxx

My bad, I found it to be an interesting read, and something fun to think about for a few minutes. I'll work on the title next time.

I wasn't mentioning you (I even thank you for posting it), the article itself has a sensationalist title.

It's just some guy named Hogan who theorizes that, instead of subnuclear particles being vibrations of the strings of existence (like notes from a guitar), they're projections of information contained in existence (like proteins are projections of DNA's information). It's nothing earth-shatteringly shocking for anyone who knows the science involved.

xxMESTxx · 11-07-2011, 12:57 PM

It's not just that guy named hogan though. He's actually just furthering the theory started by Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft. The hogan guy is just saying that the unknown noise in the geo600 could be proof of that theory.

I mean, I myself doubt that, but this guy and the complex machine making some unknown noise wasn't really what intrigued me, so much as the theory itself.

The thought that everything exist in our known universe due to light bouncing off of a 2d surface far, far away is unique. Something different I enjoyed reading, thought I'd share.

woshiniyeye · 11-18-2011, 01:18 AM

Beautiful work and lovely detail!

___________________
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11-07-2011, 04:24 AM	#2
Numinous Writing speed: snail Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Porto, Portugal Posts: 4,911 Thanks: 8,546 Thanked 11,646 Times in 4,015 Posts	Re: Is Earth a Hologram? Ugh, I really hate articles with sensationalist titles just to attract the laymen into a disappointment. This only concerns quantum physics and their relation to Einsteinian astrophysics and if it's confirmed, I don't see anything but the fields I mentioned being shaken. __________________ My writings: Waters of Ocean Darkest Chapters: 1 - 2 Weaver Chapters: 0 - 1- 2 - 3 Björk Season My Top 25 Non-Romantic Songs

11-07-2011, 09:03 AM	#4
xxMESTxx EffYouSeeKay Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: The Mountains Age: 21 Posts: 908 Thanks: 1,343 Thanked 606 Times in 300 Posts	Re: Is Earth a Hologram? My bad, I found it to be an interesting read, and something fun to think about for a few minutes. I'll work on the title next time. __________________ "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." -M. K. Gandhi

11-07-2011, 12:57 PM	#6
xxMESTxx EffYouSeeKay Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: The Mountains Age: 21 Posts: 908 Thanks: 1,343 Thanked 606 Times in 300 Posts	Re: Is Earth a Hologram? It's not just that guy named hogan though. He's actually just furthering the theory started by Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft. The hogan guy is just saying that the unknown noise in the geo600 could be proof of that theory. I mean, I myself doubt that, but this guy and the complex machine making some unknown noise wasn't really what intrigued me, so much as the theory itself. The thought that everything exist in our known universe due to light bouncing off of a 2d surface far, far away is unique. Something different I enjoyed reading, thought I'd share. __________________ "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." -M. K. Gandhi

11-18-2011, 01:18 AM	#7
woshiniyeye Academy Student Join Date: Nov 2011 Posts: 1 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	Re: Is Earth a Hologram? Beautiful work and lovely detail! ___________________ "Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" Diablo 3 Gold Diablo 3 Accounts Diablo 3 News

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