DocM Posted July 29, 2011 Share Posted July 29, 2011 I posted a bit about this in the Milky Way thread with a couple links, but New Scientist Magazine (UK) is publishing a 13-part Existance series, one of which covers a holographic universe. The first 7 articles are online now, with the rest coming August 1, 2011. Existance covers much more than this, so check out the rest too.(Link....) New Scientist: Existance: Am I A Hologram?.... Existence: Am I a hologram?TAKE a look around you. The walls, the chair you're sitting in, your own body - they all seem real and solid. Yet there is a possibility that everything we see in the universe - including you and me - may be nothing more than a hologram. It sounds preposterous, yet there is already some evidence that it may be true, and we could know for sure within a couple of years. If it does turn out to be the case, it would turn our common-sense conception of reality inside out. The idea has a long history, stemming from an apparent paradox posed by Stephen Hawking's work in the 1970s. He discovered that black holes slowly radiate their mass away. This Hawking radiation appears to carry no information, however, raising the question of what happens to the information that described the original star once the black hole evaporates. It is a cornerstone of physics that information cannot be destroyed. In 1972 Jacob Bekenstein at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, showed that the information content of a black hole is proportional to the two-dimensional surface area of its event horizon - the point-of-no-return for in-falling light or matter. Later, string theorists managed to show how the original star's information could be encoded in tiny lumps and bumps on the event horizon, which would then imprint it on the Hawking radiation departing the black hole. This solved the paradox, but theoretical physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft decided to take the idea a step further: if a three-dimensional star could be encoded on a black hole's 2D event horizon, maybe the same could be true of the whole universe. The universe does, after all, have a horizon 42 billion light years away, beyond which point light would not have had time to reach us since the big bang. Susskind and 't Hooft suggested that this 2D "surface" may encode the entire 3D universe that we experience - much like the 3D hologram that is projected from your credit card. It sounds crazy, but we have already seen a sign that it may be true. Theoretical physicists have long suspected that space-time is pixelated, or grainy. Since a 2D surface cannot store sufficient information to render a 3D object perfectly, these pixels would be bigger in a hologram. "Being in the [holographic] universe is like being in a 3D movie," says Craig Hogan of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. "On a large scale, it looks smooth and three-dimensional, but if you get close to the screen, you can tell that it is flat and pixelated." > Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mudslag Posted July 29, 2011 Share Posted July 29, 2011 the 13th floor??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yusuf M. Veteran Posted July 29, 2011 Veteran Share Posted July 29, 2011 It's definitely interesting and I'd love to read the science behind it. I wonder how it'd affect our understanding of mathematics and biology. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KayMan2K Posted July 29, 2011 Share Posted July 29, 2011 or maybe not... http://bigthink.com/ideas/39164 http://hotblogr.com/?v=syOcg37NKYq Fun thought experiment. Interesting to see what the final outcome is with even more testing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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