Do we live in a giant hologram?

[thecrazyscot]

Article.

If a friend told you that we were all living in a giant hologram, you’d probably tell him to lay off the kush. But incredibly, physicists across the world are thinking the same thing: That what we perceive to be a three-dimensional universe might just be the image of a two-dimensional one, projected across a massive cosmic horizon.

Yes, it sounds more than a little insane. The 3D nature of our world is as fundamental to our sense of reality as the fact that time runs forward. And yet some researchers believe that contradictions between Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics might be reconciled if every three-dimensional object we know and cherish is a projection of tiny, subatomic bytes of information stored in a two-dimensional Flatland.

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As Motherboard reported last year, Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics Director Craig Hogan recently hypothesized that our macroscopic world is like a “four-dimensional video display” created from pixel-like bits of subatomic information 10 trillion trillion times smaller than atoms. To our macroscopic eyes, everything around us appears three-dimensional. But just as moving your face toward the TV screen will cause pixels to come into focus, if we stare deeply enough into matter on a subatomic level, the bitmap of our holographic universe might reveal itself.

So. If this depiction of space is correct, then like any computer, there is an inherent limit to the universe’s data storage and processing capacity. What’s more, that limit should bear telltale signatures—so-called “holographic noise”—that we can measure.

As Hogan explained to Motherboard’s Jason Koebler, if we are indeed living in a hologram, "the basic effect is that reality has a limited amount of information, like a Netflix movie when Comcast is not giving you enough bandwidth. So things are a little blurry and jittery. Nothing ever just stands still, but is always moving a tiny bit."

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Well this would certainly have some interesting implications.

 

[BvBPL]

I first heard of this theory some fourteen years ago. Since then it has been brought up multiple times. Each time the model fades back into the background after some initial attention.

 

[Kozmos]

How does this if at all relate to Digital Physics?

 

[BvBPL]

How does this if at all relate to Digital Physics?

Hard to put my finger on it.

 

[CavLancer]

Warning...some of these have profanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KcPNiworbo

 

[warpus]

Quantum physics seems to contradict that digital physics stuff, just at first glance though.

As for this "we live inside a hologram" stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if there are just many ways of looking at what reality is - multiple interpretations, each one being 100% correct, depending on how you look at it.

 

[Kozmos]

Quantum physics seems to contradict that digital physics stuff, just at first glance though.

The way I heard it, quantum physics are part of it, in the same way things are blurry in games until you get close enough to see it or measure it. That's how my dumb brain understood what was explained to it.

 

[Rashiminos]

On a related tangent, are we living in someone's dream(s)?

 

[Borachio]

"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."

 

[Perfection]

I should really come to understand this better, if anyone knows a good introductory book for the slightly educated layman (I have a physics minor) I would be most appreciative.

 

[Borachio]

These stories come and go, though.

Back in the day it was all about whether space was hyperbolic or Euclidian. What happened to that old chestnut?

 

[FredLC]

I love to read about modern physics, and did read some books on relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory. I still have to catch up more in Gravity loop theory and in the holographic principle.

As far as holography goes, to my knowledge, it originated when Leonard Suskind refused to accept a very through mathematical demonstration, from Stephen Hawking, that as black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation, the resulting cloud of particles would be featureless, and the cloud from one black hole would be indistinguishable from another, save a difference in size.

The problem is that it implies information loss, the inability in principle (not in practice, in practice loosing information happens all the time), to retrace the former configuration of the black hole, and going back further, of the objects that fell into it.

Information loss is a problem because not only it turns the universe unintelligible, as you cannot infer processes from observation of the consequences if the data in lost in principle, it also implies destruction of energy, as information is carried in energy.

Suskind, after a decade-long study, came to propose that not the volume, but the surface area of the event horizon of a black hole contains the data of every single thing that is swallowed, making it a 2d version, or map, of the previous object(s), and that the same Hawking radiation carries that information away as it is projected into the cosmos, preserving it into reality. The idea is more intrincated than that, I read once about the process through which the info is preserved in plank-sized bits in the event horizon, but as I said, my understanding of holography is very limited, so I really cannot communicate it right now.

Anyways, the issue here is that the process given was not particular of the circumstances of a black hole. Nothing prevented the same 2d/3d relation to happen everywhere, and adopting it could clue us in the workings of quantum entanglement, as maybe there is no violation of the speed of light at all, maybe atoms respond instantly to each other not because information travelled instantly, but because the 2d based description of them is,indeed, together, and the 3d result is merely a projection of this interaction.

So, it was theoretically postulated that there is a 2d surface somewhere, maybe physically, maybe in a different dimension (and it is always curious to think of a deeper knowledge in a lower, not a higher, dimension), that contains a interactive flatland in which all the information of the universe is equally contained. Ergo, holography, as an hologram is a 3d representation of a 2d database.

It is all awfully theoretical at this point, of course, and maybe entirely wrong, perhaps information simply can be lost, or perhaps it is saved by an entirely different process. It is very interesting, though.

Regards .

 

[Kyriakos]

Quantum physics seems to contradict that digital physics stuff, just at first glance though.

As for this "we live inside a hologram" stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if there are just many ways of looking at what reality is - multiple interpretations, each one being 100% correct, depending on how you look at it.

Yes.
Worse thing is that all that is not new at all. By more than 2500 years.

Besides, even in just the physics world, doesn't this claim (that the physical world may be something hugely different from what is sensed/thought of by humans/finite creatures) already have a form in the Incompleteness and Ambiguity theories? Eg that we always form a thinking system or have senses in a set which exists without its axioms proven or shown inside it. Ie what we sense/think inherently is not tied to an absolute reality.

At any rate in philosophical terms this sort of issue came to be termed as "principles of the first philosophy", by Aristotle (and later philosophers tended to use this phrase too, eg Descartes- but he was a crude beardo).

 

[Kyriakos]

"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."

I recall you don't particularly like this poem, but:


A Dream Within a Dream
By Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

 

[Perfection]

If the universe is 2 dimensional maybe it's just a giant excel spreadsheet?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Bill Gates, King of the Universe!!

 

[gay_Aleks]

Only after the 5th shot.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Does the universe exist without an observer?
How much of its nature is dependent upon the perception of that observer?

 

[Perfection]

When the observers ceased to exist they stopped making new episodes in any universe.