Fermilab To Test Holographic Universe Theory 166
eldavojohn writes "Scientists at Fermilab have decided that it's high time they build a 'holometer' to test the smoothness of space-time. Theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking have proposed that space-time is not smooth but it's been a lot of math and no actual data. The Fermilab team plans to build two relatively small devices that act as 'holographic interferometers' to measure the shaking or vibration in split beams of light traveling through a vacuum. If the team finds the shaking in their measurements and records them, the theory of a holographic universe will have some evidence of non-smoothness in space-time and perhaps a foothold in bringing light to the heavily debated theoretical physics."
Physicists (Score:5, Funny)
One day these physicists will find out too much and get our simulation shut down.
A Douglas Adams quote comes to mind (Score:5, Informative)
"There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened." -- Douglas Adams
Re:A Douglas Adams quote comes to mind (Score:4, Interesting)
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"There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened." -- Douglas Adams
There is a third theory which states that Haruhi Suzumiya has already done this.
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I thought it was Hatsune Miku?
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Wait...this is theoretical physics, right? Why are they trying to do experiments???
OH snap. :-)
all fun and games (Score:2, Informative)
until they actually do shut you down. http://www.simulation-argument.com/ [simulation-argument.com]
How do you know they'll shut it down? (Score:4, Funny)
How do you know it'll be shut down. I mean I can also imagine the scenario that involves a booming voice going,
"Ah-ha, motherfuckers. That's the moment I've been waiting for. You're finally smart enough to understand what I'm gonna say more than that goat-fucker.. err.. herder I caught hanging around a burning hemp bush some 3000 of your years ago. Moses, I think he was called. Like that I didn't go 'let there be light' like that stoner wrote. What I told him was that I coded transform and lighting first. And of course the Earth was without form and void, because everything was: I had a 4 triangle tetrahedron as the only object to test that transform and lighting shit on. But judging by what's on your instruments right now, you've just figured out what I'm saying. Smart lads.
"But I think you have a bunch of questions first, we'll get to the cosmology later...
"What? Original sin? Well, when those two did it, it may have been original for your world, 'cause there was nobody to do it before them, but in the meantime it's kinda copycat sin if you get my drift. And which of them do you mean? Those two had quite the kinky ideas... Oh, apple? Nah, let's just say they got kicked out for more like bug abuse and duping items, and let's leave it at that. Next question...
"If I really hate women? What kind of retarded question is that? I wouldn't have made them if I hated them. Or I could have taken them out in a patch. Mind you, I might have dropped that Moses guy a hint that I'm not really into women, but the rest is his own confabulation.
"Which brings me to the next point, actually. I totally didn't tell him to kill gays. I mean, I just told you I'm not into women. You figure it out." ;)
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God as a programmer/BOFH?
A little masturbatory, don't you think?
Re:How do you know they'll shut it down? (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole hypothesis is that the universe is a _digital_ hologram. As in, literally, the information is encoded in _pixels_. And there is a rather serious possible implication that the universe might be a digital simulation.
I dunno. It kinda seems natural that if someone wrote a digital simulation, they would be a programmer, and running whatever machine does it would make them an admin. I mean, really, the setup doesn't exactly leave many other options available even if I wanted to take the piss in a different way.
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The whole problem with the "the universe is a simulation" gig is that it doesn't answer any questions or solve any problems. It's just one more turtle on the stack. Sure, it might be true, Occam's Razor says it's not very likely.
A commenter posted something on here a few months ago that I thought was extremely insightful:
Any chain of logic (or causality) must either extend forever and ever, or stop at something that just 'is', and both options are nonsensical. (This is equally true whether or not any of the links in the chain are God)." - Slashdot comment http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1774738&cid=33449910 [slashdot.org] by http://slashdot.org/~timeOday [slashdot.org]
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Maybe. It's not like I'm calling it a theory or using it to prove anything. But when making a joke in answer to a message (in fact two messages in response to each other) about someone turning off the simulation, you kinda have limited room to wiggle.
But at any rate, that God post was a joke post. (And in response to a joke post.) Maybe not the best of jokes by a wide margin, but still not serious stuff. You kinda have to play fast and loose with the science there, because just going on about the jitter in
Re:Physicists (Score:4, Interesting)
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story (one of my least favorites, as its premise was entirely false) similar to that. In the story, a scientist tries to find out why people laugh, discovers that there's no such thing as an original joke (the false premise), and the end of the story finds that humor is just aliens running a lab experiment on us. The story ends with the characters waiting to see what it's replaced with.
There is a similar snippet in HHGTG. I'd look them both up, but I don't have my library with me.
What TFA didn't say was, could this holographic universe be an artificial creation? It somehow seems to toy with the idea without actually coming out and saying it.
Re:Physicists (Score:5, Informative)
When they say 'holographic universe', what they are saying is that while we think we live in three dimensions, we're really only living in two. The universe stores information that the rules of physics turn into the illusion of a third dimension.
You *could* extrapolate that to mean that our universe is, when you get down to its bare essence, only data. And you *could* extrapolate that to mean we are data in a simulation somewhere. But that's two leaps of logic past what the science is actually saying.
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Finally, vindication for the flat Earthers!
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You *could* extrapolate that to mean that our universe is [...]
in fact, unidimensional; you know, like the space address in a computer RAM, each byte at the prevAddr++.
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Surprisingly, no. If the holographic theory is proven, it will mean that our universe contains a minimum of two dimensions. (The maximum remains up in the air, as string theory adds a lot of dimensions that we can't touch.)
Re:Physicists (Score:5, Funny)
The lord PUSHeth and the lord POPeth away.
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Maybe he's PEEKing and POKEing instead.
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FIB4FO Queue:
First InB4 First Out...
Re:Physicists (Score:5, Informative)
I think the holographic universe term means that all of the information inside a volume can be encoded on the surface of the volume. That's where the two-dimensional versus three-dimensional part of the discussion comes from.
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The volume is three-dimensional, the surface is two-dimensional.
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Of course you could extrapolate any science theory to mean that we are only data. That is because such theories are created using math, and any kind of math could be translated to a set of data and computer operations. I've seen a big number of people sudenly discover that, and becoming concerned about our universe being a simulation. (Well, I'm guilty too, but shortly after, I remembered Turing...)
Now, of course, that doesn't mean we are not on a simulation, just that we have no evidence that we are in one
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So... wait, like DOOM or DOOM II?
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"while we think we live in three dimensions, we're really only living in two."
Simpsons did it.
Plank Length Cheating is The Real Issue (Score:2)
You *could* extrapolate that to mean that our universe is, when you get down to its bare essence, only data. And you *could* extrapolate that to mean we are data in a simulation somewhere. But that's two leaps of logic past what the science is actually saying.
No, you're missing the interesting wrinkle, and that's the apparent Plank length. If the Plank length is A, the Universe behaves in way A'. If the Plank length is B, the Universe behaves in way B'. This is fine - we see the Universe behaving as A',
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It's not just a simple flattening, the projection formula is probably pretty damn complicated (and I hate complicated math). The simplification tells you what it roughly means, the details obviously require in-depth knowledge.
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No they won't. The maintainers told me they really don't mind.
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One day these physicists will find out too much and get our simulation shut down.
I don't know whether to mod you Insightful or Funny.
Re:Physicists (Score:4, Insightful)
Computers evolve at an increasing rate. At somebody, not that far into the future if you compare it to the age of the universe, you will have computers to run a simulated universe that contains autonomous agents to whom the universe appears real. A few years later you can run two simulations on parallel on one machine. A couple decades after that you can run about a million such simulations at once. A few years more after that it's a few million believable, internally consistent universes running in parallel on a single computer. So given Moore's law you will eventually end up with a single physical universe and hugely many simulated universes.
Question: isn't it much more likely that we exist in one of the simulated universes instead of the original one?
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You can already do that - it's what every computer game is, at heart.
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Sorry to answer twice.
Every simulated universe exist inside the original universe, as does everything inside them. The real question is: is it possible to figure out the physics of the containing universe from the simulated one? In other words, could the simulated universe be simulated by different "host" universes, and perhaps be transferred between them, in the manner of a virtual machine?
Even
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Short answer: no.
Long answer: because your question rests on the premise that it is possible to have a universe that is indistinguishable from the real one operating in a virtual capacity, and that to the denizens of that virtual universe there is no way to prove they are or are not virtual, your question is not falsifiable. There's simply no way to prove or disprove your hypothesis. In which case, it's meaningless naval gazing, and the only appropriate answer is "no".
It's the same thing when people as "Is
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that to the denizens of that virtual universe there is no way to prove they are or are not virtual, your question is not falsifiable
Actually, this is precisely what the experiment in TFA is looking into. 'They' could cheat the Plank length and make the universe behave as if the Plank length weren't cheated, but they can't hide the evidence of that cheating.
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I don't understand, how do you cheat the Planck length? It's one of the constants of the universe (or rather, it's constructed from several constants of the universe). Presumably, if the universe were a simulation, it would be loaded with certain constants, from which we derive the Planck length.
But please continue, I'd love to learn more about this.
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Does this [slashdot.org] help?
Nobody knows how or anything else much yet. The 'why' would seem to be so that a given type of universe can be simulated at lower cost without giving up much accuracy.
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Not really, no, but that's no fault of yours. This seems like one of those issues that can't be neatly wrapped in a few forum posts. I'll have to look for a book on the subject. Thanks, though.
Re:Physicists (Score:5, Informative)
So given Moore's law you will eventually end up with a single physical universe and hugely many simulated universes.
Moore's law is an observation about how fast technology is developing, not an incontrovertible law of physics. It will not hold forever, because eventually we will run up against physical limits preventing us from cramming more computing power into a given region.
In particular, it is impossible for a given amount of matter to perfectly simulate more matter than itself. If it were possible -- if you could e.g. use a ten kilogram computer to simulate twenty kilograms of matter -- then your ten kilogram computer could simulate two of itself, doubling its storage. Further, each of those computers could then simulate two more, and so forth, leading to an obvious contradiction (infinite storage requires infinite entropy, which has been proved impossible). Note that this argument holds even if the simulation is slower than real time; no matter how long it takes to simulate, you can't store more memory than you had to start with.
Now, of course this all hinges on the word "perfectly". There's no reason a computer can't simulate large amounts of matter with less-than-perfect fidelity, which is something that we do all the time. But given that we can build working computers, nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, and all that, let alone the vastly-more-complicated processes going on in each and every cell in your body, we are clearly not living in some cut-rate simulation which is hand-waving the laws of physics. We don't know how to model all of this stuff in a computer, but given that it takes supercomputers to simulate hydrogen atoms accurately, and we can't even solve the equations by the time we get to helium, it seems safe to assume that no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, it will always require a couple orders of magnitude more matter than what you're trying to simulate (if you doubt this, consider a practical example of a computer trying to simulate itself. Can you really picture a computer with 4GB of memory accurately simulating the behavior of 4GB of RAM at the subatomic level? It can't even emulate a different computer with 4GB of memory, let alone simulate it at the subatomic level). So, we're talking about a computer which is, at an absolute minimum, a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the entire universe.
(For completeness, I will point out two possible "outs" for this problem: First, it's possible that there's some trickiness going on, and "the entire universe" isn't actually modeled. Maybe only a small portion of the universe is modeled accurately, and everything else is an easy low-grade simulation used to trick us. That's certainly possible, but it's also unfalsifiable, so I'm not sure it's worth seriously debating. Second, this assumes that the simulator and the simulation are operating under the same laws of physics. If the "real world" which is simulating our world has different laws of physics, which allow for vastly more powerful computers than anything we could possible hope to build using our cheap low-grade physics, this scenario wouldn't be as ridiculous. And, really, quantum mechanics is so weird that "it was outsourced to the lowest bidder" may actually be a decent explanation for it.)
Regardless, though, I don't understand how the "it is much more likely that we exist in a simulated universe" idea is getting serious traction. No, it's not impossible, but "likely" is a hell of a stretch.
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Not only that, before any civilization did that on any large scale there'd have to be many orders of magnitude improvement over reality in both storage and speed. No one is going to spend 10% of the matter of the universe to simulate an universe which runs as slow as the real universe.
If you have a complete understanding of the physics, you can do all kinds of optimizations. You set off a proton into space near c? You don't have to simulate its entire flight, only its possible interactions.
To make a bad
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I'm a doctor, not a doorstop!
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Or they figure out a bug in the simulation which allows us to escape it, spread to and infect the Olympian Internet, and hold the gods hostage.
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That, or they'll be treated to a very delicious and moist slice of cake.
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Okay, sci-fi time.
If we were hypothetically just a simulation by non-omnipotent beings, then I would want to query those running the simulation about THEIR universe. Are they part of a larger simulation as well?
What if we possibly discovered something they didn't know, and that is our reason for existence? Maybe there are hundreds or thousands of parallel simulations running to increase the chance of discovering new knowledge.
Again, good stuff that would make a great sci-fi novel. And why haven't we had a M
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And why haven't we had a Men in Black reference yet??
The archon plays with multicolored spheres. [youtube.com] (Skip to about 0:40)
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Nah, THEY will send an agent to suicide the physicists that found out too much.
Nah, THEY will send an agent to Mandelbrot the physicists that found out too much.
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The "holographic universe" theory does not talk about a computer simulation, it's about the universe being a hollow bubble that has everything happen on its surface while it appears to happen inside the bubble (you know, just like holograms appear 3D despite being encoded on a 2D surface). The jitter they're measuring has to do with the Planck distance affecting the bubble surface and causing a much larger jitter inside the projection (i.e. the minimum distance in the projection is significantly larger than
Reality of data gathered on Earth (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything they will use to explain 'reality' will be done with beautiful math. It will be difficult to prove theories and provide data about the structure of the Universe doing a highly-controlled experiment on planet Earth. I'm not saying that research like this shouldn't be done, but will anyone ever be able to provide solid 'data' about the universe conducting experiments on Earth? I would think you would have to do experiments in other environments, other than on Earth. All of the results of these experiments will have to allow for a large amount of beautiful math and a wonderful imagination.
Re:Reality of data gathered on Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
The best part of experiment are the unexpected results. Look at what happened when Michelson and Morley tried to measure the Earth's speed relative to the aether.
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Yeah... i did a school speech on that in public school. Everyone else did speeches about their summer vacations or their dogs and such.
Back then i was a bit weird... now i'm mildly autistic (although my wife says i'm getting weirder as i get older).
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Oh, what happened?
Re:Reality of data gathered on Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that research like this shouldn't be done, but will anyone ever be able to provide solid 'data' about the universe conducting experiments on Earth?
The experiment in the article attempt to do so.
Why do you doubt their ability to provide data sets on how the universe works on Earth?
I would think you would have to do experiments in other environments, other than on Earth.
Because photons travel differently in other enviroments than Earth?
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That would be interesting, but shouldn't we perform them on Earth first? If we're wrong on Earth, then we're wrong everywhere*. So, why not have a first run here, where it's cheaper?
* Even if the experiment would have gone exactly as they predicted, had it been conducted in space, being wrong on Earth would imply that their model is not entirely accurate.
(DISCLAIMER: If I sound like a lawyer, scientist, or someone important, please note that I am not and do not know what I'm talking about half the time.)
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Logic dictates that if this noise exists, it would exist everywhere. So it's not like it wouldn't exist here. You can take your measurements, but you would probably want to find a very isolated part of the universe to repeat the experiment in at a later date
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's an experiment to measure vibrations. if you are sitting on a whirling rock full of shifting matter, is that really a good place to measure the fundamental noise of space time?
Yes, I'm sure these PhD-holding theoretical physicists and the engineers involved in the project haven't considered this. Maybe you should send them an email and gift them with your deep insights.
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Because photons travel differently in other enviroments(sic) than Earth?
Yes. Otherwise your apparatus has to be large enough to maintain constant internal pressure (preferably 0), AND span your theorized bumps in spacetime. I don't know how large these ripples are, or how far apart they expect to find them, but I would expect they're going to need to span more distance than would be practical on Earth.
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The constants could change, but the rules stay the same everywhere. It's the basic Principle of Relativity behind both special and general relativity, that the laws of physics are invariant of the frame of reference.
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What makes Earth so special that data obtained here are no so good as some other unnamed location?
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Who knows? It's pretty hard to know if anything is constant when we on the universal scale has measured it just at one point. Maybe there's some other kind of "field" we don't notice because it covers the entire Milky Way and we wouldn't really realize it until we tried repeating the experiment in another galaxy.
Of course we have tried doing simulations of what we observe and it seems all the universe works the same, but the data is very limited.
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Except for the fact that the assumption of homogeneity may not be true, see the first couple of points here [newscientist.com].
You cannot prove anything... (Score:2, Redundant)
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When the physical range of a theory's predictive power extends beyond our ability to construct experiments then you pretty much have to find another job.
Why find another job? After all, the guys that generate theories don't necessarily take the pain of proving them. The mathematicians are doing this for some centuries.
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mathematicians don't have proofs?
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I'm not saying that research like this shouldn't be done, but will anyone ever be able to provide solid 'data' about the universe conducting experiments on Earth?
One of the principles of physics is that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. This has held up well under observation. So why shouldn't we expect controlled experiments on Earth to provide solid data about the universe?
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Everything they will use to explain 'reality' will be done with beautiful math.
The reverse is not necessarily true: there may be beautiful math that doesn't explain any reality.
I'm putting this as a conjecture, for the math-heads to have something to do when the entire reality get explained.
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Yes, and there is a lot of solid data. There is a lot more data that need to be collected to get a better view of the universe, but that doesn't mean we don't already have some.
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... I'm not saying that research like this shouldn't be done, but will anyone ever be able to provide solid 'data' about the universe conducting experiments on Earth? I would think you would have to do experiments in other environments, other than on Earth. All of the results of these experiments will have to allow for a large amount of beautiful math and a wonderful imagination.
Because the Earth is, after all, a fixed point in space?
The Sun moves relative to the galactic center 17 km/sec (thus covering 5.3 billion km in a decade). Earth travels 30 km/sec relative to the Sun, thus sweeping across a volume of space 300 million km across around the Sun annually, and a spiral path 10 billion km long each decade relative to the galaxy, while the Milky Way galaxy is moving at 630 km a second relative to the zero Hubble red shift frame of reference - which takes us over 200 billion km a
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Everything they will use to explain 'reality' will be done with beautiful math.
Math plays a part, but reality is really language. Whether that language is mathematics, or English, it matters not. In a sense, we create the Universe as we behold and describe it. We must look beyond the knee-jerk dismissing of anthropomorphism and semantics.
Light travels incomprehensible distances, hits the lenses of our eyes, is flipped upside-down and focused on our retina, and the rods and cones there transfer that information to our brains' ocular centers, then reinterpreted to our understanding, t
Dear Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Much appreciated.
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Please try to avoid posting two articles in a row with words like "hologram" in the title.
Nonsense. Any sufficiently agile mind should be able to hologram the overload of information hologram in the situation where hologram duality is hologram hologram adjacent to another hologram hologram hologram hologram hologram. Hologram hologram hologram, hologram hologram hologram. Hologram hologram hologram hologram; hologram hologram. Hologram hologram hologram hologram! :-)
OMG! Parent poster is being jammed... (Score:2)
...by HOLOGRAM HOLOGRAM HOLOGRAM from hologram hologram hologram of hologram hologram, hologram hologram hologram!
Hologram hologram hologram hologram? Hologram?!
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Hologram! Wonderful hologram!
But I don't like holograms!
Malkovich. (Score:2)
Malkovich,
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You win. :-)
Attempted before? (Score:1)
Theoretical Physics... (Score:2, Funny)
the theory of a holographic universe will have some evidence of non-smoothness in space-time and perhaps a foothold in bringing light to the heavily debated theoretical physics."
Bringing light into theoretical physics eh? That might just be crazy enough to work!
Awesome (Score:2)
The holographic universe theory is a return to beautiful simplicity.. the concepts are simple enough to understand and that math is really not all that hard either.
An introduction to black holes, information and the string theory revolution: The holographic universe
By Leonard Susskind, James Lindesay
It's pretty readable.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
The holographic universe theory is a return to beautiful simplicity.. the concepts are simple enough to understand and that math is really not all that hard either.
But apparently too difficult for the author of the article to understand. Otherwise they wouldn't write gibberish like this: In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined with depth.
And would instead write something like: In the holographic universe all of the dynamics in three dimensions can be fully accounted for by the boundary condition on a two-dimensional surface. The third dimension is a result of a perfectly real, actual, objective, existing process. It is not in any sense "unreal" or "an illusion", since it obviously exists and it is by studying it that we have come to the conclusion that the real, objective, existing three dimensional universe might arise from a two-dimensional boundary plus some really cool physics!"
The use of gibberish language, in which perfectly ordinary, real, objective physical phenomena like the third spatial dimension are describe as "an illusion" and "not real" won't help anyone understand the holographic universe theory, which is extremely beautiful, elegant and might even be true.
The use of such gibberish language will only create barriers to understanding in the minds of lay-people, and only people who have no clue what reality is would ever use such language unless they cared more about confusing people than enlightening them.
Could this be tested at LIGO (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Could this be tested at LIGO (Score:4, Interesting)
It's become an issue because of LIGO. They have had a problem with 'noise' that they can't seem to get rid of. A holographic universe could be the source of the 'noise'. Because a hologram encodes 3 dimensions of data in 2 dimensions, there is a loss of resolution. It's blurry. The noise problem they have may be due to the fact that at the quantum level the universe is 'blurry' and is producing the noise.
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That experiment is much more precise for detecting such kinds of noise than LIGO. As an AC already posted here, the data that led to the original suspicion about the universe being holographic appeared on LIGO, but it isn't precise enough.
TFA is quite poor on details... I remember reading about it, and it uses some kind of mechanism to get a virtual larger arm out of a physicaly short path. I don't remember if it just reflects the lasers several times, or if it does something more complex. I just remember t
I want one for XMas (Score:3)
Why is it always Hawking? (Score:2, Insightful)
The holographic universe theory comes from work by Gerardus 't Hooft. Sure Hawking did some work on it as well, can't they say Gerardus 't Hooft *and* Hawking?
I guess it's a consequence of small pools...
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The key idea of the holographic principle is that the physics of a volume can be expressed on the surface area of a sphere containing that volume. Hawking was the first one to find that result, specifically he found that the entropy of a black hole was in proportion to the surface area of the event horizon, rather than the volume it enclosed.
I don't know... obviously Hawking's work doesn't exist in a vacuum. Obviously there are lots and lots of important discoveries and insights that lots and lots of oth
Re:Why is it always Hawking? (Score:5, Informative)
No, that would be Jacob Bekenstein [scholarpedia.org]. Hawking and Bekenstein collaborated to precisely fix the ratio of entropy to surface area, but the original idea wasn't Hawking's.
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"Ut". It's an abbrevation of "het", meaning "the".
Here's a video of him speaking (in Dutch), introducing himself, sounding like HE-rard ut-HOFT:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qsf6Q4xSrU&feature=related [youtube.com]
Not Hawking... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hawking's proposal that black holes destroy information lead to OTHERS developing the Holographic theory. Hawking had nothing to do with the development of the holographic theory, complimentarity, etc...
Master Yoda says: (Score:2)
I feel disturbance in the force.
Very poor summary. Proofreading fail! (Score:2)
This summary borders on incoherent. I would have expected better, from what little I thought I knew of Eldavojohn. There are incomplete sentences and byzantine arrangements of word and phrase that effectively make no sense. It's possible with effort to discern what each sentence intends to convey, but why is that effort necessary? Where was the proofreading?
I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say that this was the worst summary I can ever recall reading at Slashdot, and I have read many thousands.
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So what laser did they use in the 1800's?
Obviously you missed the recent event where the universe was replaced with something even more stranger.
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"In a classical interferometer, first developed in the late 1800s, a laser beam in a vacuum hits a mirror called a beamsplitter, which breaks it in two".
And elsewhere:
"In 1917, Albert Einstein established the theoretic foundations for the LASER"
So what laser did they use in the 1800's?
A candle and a lense.
Yes, seriously.
The method was first developed by sir Archibald Bradley, who... No, silly, I wasn't being serious.
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They really are Romantic Interferometers now. We started with Baroque Interferometers, but since those didn't work, next came Classical. The dark energy interferometers will be Serialist.
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"By building two relatively small devices that act as "holographic interferometers" to measure the shaking or vibration in split beams of light traveling through a vacuum." is not a sentence. What will be achieved by doing this?
For sure, they'll achieve more than!