The Universe As Hologram

Several readers sent in news of theoretical work bolstering the proposition that the universe may be a hologram. The story begins at the German experiment GEO600, a laser inteferometer looking for gravity waves. For years, researchers there have been locating and eliminating sources of interference and noise from the experiment (they have not yet seen a gravity wave). For months they have been puzzling over a source of noise they could not explain. Then Craig Hogan, a Fermilab physicist, approached them with a possible answer: that GEO600 may have stumbled upon a fundamental limit where space-time stops behaving like a smooth continuum and instead dissolves into "grains." The "holographic principle" suggests that the universe at small scales would be "blurry," its smallest features far larger than Planck scale, and possibly accessible to current technology such as the GEO600. The holographic principle, if borne out, could help distinguish among competing theories of quantum gravity, but "We think it's at least a year too early to get excited," the lead GEO600 scientist said.

Comments

Alrighty then

[Jonah Bomber]

[pulls out 3-D glasses]

Re:Alrighty then

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not actually blurry. Your 3d glasses are just dirty.

Re:Alrighty then

[mcgrew]

You don't need glasses to view a hologram. Unlike a stereoscopic film with two almost identical pictures, a transmission hologram (we learned about it in an undergrad physics class in college) is a single image that looks like nothing but an interference pattern, which is exactly what it is. When laser light is passed through a lens so that it is not a straight narrow beam, but gets wider as it gets more distant, the image appears in true 3-D on the film. If you move to the side you can see around objects in the picture.

To make one of these, you need two lasers and a large photographic film. One laser is shined on the subject and the other at the film, and it records the interference between the two lasers.

Of course, if you're nearsighted you'll need glasses to see it clearly. Or maybe contact lenses. If you have serious stabismus (crossed eyes) or are blind in one eye or for some other medical reason can't see stereoscopically, 3-D movies are no different than normal 2-D movies, but holograms are still in 3-D.

There are excellent holograms at the museum of magic and witchcraft in San Fransisco (if it's still there; I visited in the early 70s). There are also holograms at Disney World, most notably in the Haunted Mansion. There is a stereoscopic movie using polarized glasses at Epcot.

I saw a New Scientist article on the "universe may be a hologram" last week, but I think some theorists are misunderstanding what they're seeing (or reporters are misunderstanding what the theorists are saying).

Of course, our "reality" may not in fact be real. It may well be a videogame and you paid good money (or what passes for money in the real reality) to play (whoever dies with the most stuff loses), or it may be punishment for some horrible crime you commited in the real universe.

Or Morpheus may simply be looking for Neo. Or Geordi may be enjoying himself and you'll disappear when he says "end program".

Re:Alrighty then

[KDR_11k]

There are hologram postcards in many department stores, too.

Your comparison with videogames, the Matrix and Star Trek implies that you are the one misunderstanding it. It's a hologram in the sense you described first, a 2d (or whatever) surface that projects to a 3d volume. That doesn't make it not real, just flatter.

Re:Alrighty then

[mcgrew]

A hologram of a dice is not real, it is simply an image.

Re:Alrighty then

[gd23ka]

Obviously you haven't thought this one through yet. If I understand this correctly - as a layperson - that means my experience of the physical and tangible is just a reflection of what must essentially be me on a 2D plane. Well then if that's so, depending on how _you_ look at it, I have my thumb in your ass. There then exists a point of view from where that is so, think of it in terms of the Many Worlds theories. Amazing and also unnerving at the same time, because it being a hologram that makes the _you_ and _me_ in the equation a variable which leads us to the final devastating realization that there is a set of points of view V where everybody has a thumb in everybody else's butt. Kind of humbles you when you think about it, doesn't it, I know it does that for me.

Re:Alrighty then

[KDR_11k]

Yes but a holographic universe is still real, it just has one dimension less than perceived. The article mentions a proof that a 5 dimensional universe can be a projection of a four-dimensional "plane" while retaining all of its physics (and with physics it's obviously not a static image).

Re:Alrighty then

[DinDaddy]

"There are also holograms at Disney World, most notably in the Haunted Mansion. "

Curious what you believe to be a hologram in the Haunted Mansion.

Re:Alrighty then

[Mozk]

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Does this mean ...

[wtansill]

That we're all living on a small anti-counterfeiting patch on God's MasterCard?

Re:Does this mean ...

[orlanz]

Anyone else feel guilt for tilting their cards back and forth in the light. I can barely grasp the universal consequences of my seemingly innocent action.

Re:Does this mean ...

[Theolojin]

That we're all living on a small anti-counterfeiting patch on God's MasterCard?

You know He's omnipresent, right? God doesn't use MasterCard. He uses Visa since it's everywhere He wants to be.

Oh, my. Sorry. That was really bad.

Re:Does this mean ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooo close...

God doesn't charge anything. He already owns it all, after all, He created it.

We, on the other hand, have a debt to be paid.

Woops, sorry, a little Christian humor there. Sort of like the WWJD thingies; WWJD if his plane hit two bird flocks and lost both engines? No, Jesus would have not have taken a more carbon-neutral form of transportation, He would merely make His presence known wherever He wanted to. No physical travel needed.

This is funny at my church, trust me. And my church isn't wierd at all. I've been to wierd. I know the difference...

Re:Does this mean ...

[misterooga]

no, no... it was priceless!

Re:Does this mean ...

[khellendros1984]

Wow, and I thought *my* pastor told crappy jokes...

Re:Does this mean ...

[Valdrax]

This is funny at my church, trust me.

Must be in the delivery, then.

Re:Does this mean ...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It means we're living inside a small orb that hangs on Orion the cat's belt. Also, there are 5-6 foot tall space cockroaches.

Now if you'll just direct your attention to this small shiny object ...

Re:Does this mean ...

[Bryan K. Feir]

Naah, it's in the deliverance.

Plato

[MyLongNickName]

Was in Plato who suggested that people were only seeing a shadow of reality and it was up to philosophers to see the reality and describe it to the masses? It has been years since I studied philosophy, but I seem to recall something like this. I also seem to recall one of his lesser-known disciples, Aristotle discounting this altogether and starting his own school of thought.

Amazing how things come full circle.

Re:Plato

[Lord Byron II]

Please don't confuse philosophy and physics. They are two separate fields. The physics here is suggesting that the Universe might behave. Plato was commenting on the difference between human perception and reality.

Re:Plato

[zappepcs]

That got hijacked by the neocons:

people were only seeing a shadow of reality and it was up to politicians to see the reality and describe it to the masses?

Re:Plato

[Entropy2016]

Nothing has come full circle, as this idea hasn't been confirmed by rigorous experimentation.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually this isn't a bad tie in.
Plato wasn't discussing human perception as in each person's perception is different but that we only see a shadow of truth.

If we're living 'in a hologram' where we are unable to perceive an extra dimension that exists and affects us, then is it really that different from Plato's example?

Re:Plato

[AKAImBatman]

I'd be careful about how much stock you put in their philosophies vs. the way the universe actually works. Plato and Aristotle floated a lot of ideas. Being the first of their kind, they had a pretty open slate to work with. But let's not forget that Plato and Aristotle held the world back for thousands of years with some of their ideas. e.g. Mice spontaneously generated out of meat. All matter was composed of the elements of nature (earth, wind, fire, water) which were each composed of "platonic solids" (microscopic 3D shapes like cubes and tetrahedrons). The existence of the "aether", a material that bound all things together through open space.

Some of their ideas had merit and simply needed more investigation to prove or disprove. But some mistakes like abiogenesis should not have been accepted as fact for as long as they were. It's incredible to my mind (inconceivable! :-P) that for all the intelligence and know-how of the ancient world, no one worked out a simple experiment to prove or disprove spontaneous generation!

Re:Plato

[Thiez]

> Amazing how things come full circle.

If by a 'full circle' you mean that you are able to identify one of the millions of ideas from the past that has, when interpreted in a certain way, certain superficial similarities with a theory in modern physics, then yes, amazing!

Re:Plato

[pluther]

Perfect.
Neither was Plato's.

Re:Plato

[Hognoxious]

The physics here is suggesting that the Universe might behave.

If it thinks 6 x 9 = 42, I'd say it's misbehaving.

Re:Plato

[Erothyme]

Separate fields? Physics is a subset of philosophy. If you can't tie them together, you've missed something.

Re:Plato

[CFTM]

It's known as the Allegory of the Cave, it's a dialogue between Socrates (Plato's teacher) and Glaucon (Plato's brother). When I was still in university, there seemed to be some debate to how real Socrates the man was, but don't know if that's changed (University wasn't too long ago for me....5 years).

It is amazing how many Philosophers have touched on ideas the end up being partially true in the physical world, though that is more happenstance then brilliance on their part :)

Re:Plato

[Hordeking]

e.g. Mice spontaneously generated out of meat.

Not mice. Flies. Mice don't generally like meat all that much (thought they'll eat it in a pinch.). They are, however, insectivorous.

Re:Plato

[nine-times]

Yes, it was Plato. Or perhaps it's worth noting: Socrates (the character) posited that idea in a dialog (i.e. possibly fictional conversation) written by Plato.

The idea was not so much that philosophers were charged with seeing reality and describing it to the masses. Rather, it was a description of certain kinds of difficulty with knowledge. He's describing how it's difficult to know what reality is, and that for all the problems with failing to know "the truth" about a thing, there are other sorts of problems faced by those who know.

There is commonly a lesson drawn from it, that the world that we know may not be the world as it is, but I don't think he had anything so literal and scientific as this in mind. The fact that this may be discoverable, provable, and explainable makes me think that something like this should be disqualified as the sort of "truth" that Socrates is referring to. It's a little too mundane.

Re:Plato

[Jabbrwokk]

I don't think it's fair to say they held the world back. It's just that no one bothered coming up with better explanations than theirs for quite some time.

Kind of like how in 1,000 years people will look at the way we explain many things as quaint, antiquated and ignorant.

Re:Plato

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Physics is a subset of philosophy.

No, it's really not.

If you can't tie them together, you've missed something.

What you're missing is the fundamental difference between philosophy and science (including physics.) Philosophy starts with axioms. Science starts with observations. From there on out, the logical reasoning processes of philosophers and scientists are very similar, but the fact that axioms are not subject to modification based on observation makes the results of the fields entirely different.

Re:Plato

[jellomizer]

Mixing philosophy and physics is actually a good idea.
Philosophy is actually a good study for the mind, it actually helps you to see other options.
If you can Philosophically ask yourself what if everything I know is wrong, then how might the universe behave to match my perceptions, without following what I expect to be true.

Sometimes Science comes up with an answer that fits that available data, which is actually incorrect. Which is normally found by finding new data that the original answer doesn't work. However it is possible there are a lot of things we conceive truth where we haven't found data to disprove yet. If the scientist was a good study in philosophy he may be able to come up with alternate solutions to his idea, which may lead to testing for new data for proof.

Re:Plato

[camperdave]

It's incredible to my mind (inconceivable! :-P) that for all the intelligence and know-how of the ancient world, no one worked out a simple experiment to prove or disprove spontaneous generation!

Why would they need to? There were "experiments" going on all the time in the ancient world, just as there are in refrigerators all over the planet today. A piece of food would get left somewhere, and when it was found again, it would be covered with mold, maggots and flies. It was obvious.

Re:Plato

[genner]

Axioms are necessary before observation can even be trusted. How do you know what your observing isn't all an illusion?

Re:Plato

[sjames]

True, however we do have some interesting pointers in that direction and it sounds like the necessary followups are already in the works. First by improving the current device and planning for a far more sensitive instrument designed specifically to test the holographic theory.

Re:Plato

[drerwk]

Science starts with the proposition that the Universe is rational and can be observed in a rational and repeatable manner. Then the observations are worth making.

Re:Plato

[Itninja]

Being the first of their kind, they had a pretty open slate to work with.

They weren't the first of their kind as much as they were the first of their caste. They were privileged ruling class citizens that had enough social and political connections to get whatever they thought entered into the public record (i.e. published). No doubt there were other insightful farmers, slaves, women, etc that had the ability to explain much of the world with just as much skill but, because they could not publish their thoughts, history assumes they were simpletons or otherwise unremarkable.

Re:Plato

[Merls the Sneaky]

Similar to Einstein's "thought experiments"?

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

Science starts with the proposition that the Universe is rational and can be observed in a rational and repeatable manner. Then the observations are worth making.

This isn't even true. "Science" does not present a unified philosophical front. Even if it did, this is a very strong philosophical claim ("the Universe is rational?!") Your lack of knowledge about the issues has been revealed. I hope you are merely a self-styled scientist.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

Philosophy starts with axioms. Science starts with observations.

No, science starts with the acceptance of the scientific method as a way to determine the "truth". It presupposes the accuracy of our senses, the non-arbitrariness of the universe, and even the notion that there is an external universe to study at all.

While many philosophic systems rest on axioms, those axioms are not arbitrary. They are invented, or discovered, because they logically explain the experiences of the philosopher. Philosophers use the scientific method to determine the axioms which underlie their systems. Without philosophy, there would be no way to argue that the scientific method was valid at all.

Re:Plato

[purfledspruce]

Physics is a subset of philosophy.

No, it's really not.

Yes, it really is. There's a reason that almost all nonmedical doctorate degrees carry the same title: Doctor of Philosophy. In its highest form, all human knowledge is similar--it requires human thought, and as such is inherently philosophy.

Re:Plato

[pla]

Philosophy starts with axioms. Science starts with observations.

Science starts with the axiom that something objectively exists to observe. It further presupposes both causality and (except for some of the most out-there interpretations of the quantum world) locality.

Try as you might to avoid it, you need axioms. Without a few basic assumptions about our world, you end up with solipsism.

Re:Plato

[chill]

All matter was composed of the elements of nature (earth, wind, fire, water)...

Semantics. Please point out any matter that isn't solid (earth), gas (air), plasma (fire) or liquid (water).

Re:Plato

[Facetious]

Yes, props for remembering the Allegory of the Cave. It's funny that you mention detractors of Plato. An author I know just finished working on a book he called The Platonic Idiom. It's available through lulu.com: http://www.lulu.com/content/3614575. I look forward to reading his finished version.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but I am still banking on the theory that we are on the back of a giant turtle.

Re:Plato

[Barradrewda]

I think what you are referring to is Plato's "forms". The objects we encounter merely participate in the -ness of the perfect forms which reside in what is playfully (or pejoratively) called Plato's Heaven. So my chair is a chair because it has the property "chairness", that is, there is a perfect chair that resides outside of our perceptual reality that lends its form to my chair. It is a bit more detailed but that is the gist. Aristotle was right to abandon it.
And as for the comments below about the distinction between philosophy and physics, both Descartes and Newton were considered philosophers. Most contemporary philosophy, though, relies heavily on the natural sciences to support or confute philosophical theories. Philosophy of mind works with cognitive science, philosophy of language with various natural sciences, and metaphysics with chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc... I prefer Wittgenstein's definition of philosophy from the Tractatus. He calls philosophy an "activity" that is meant to sharpen and hone the critical thinking necessary in scientific inquiry. There are many cases where philosophical theories have been supported by scientific investigation just as many have been thrown out because certain scientific hypotheses do not support them.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

God.

Re:Plato

[Muad'Dave]

Mice were spontaneously generated from piles of rags.

Re:Plato

[eleuthero]

what then is science? I thought it involved testing hypotheses about the way things are in reality. You have to have a basis for interpreting your data and that's where philosophy jumps in--hence why there are "philosophy of science" courses at pretty much any school you can pick.

Re:Plato

[AKAImBatman]

Derrr... that was a miscommunication between brain and fingers. It's supposed to read "grain". Meat was maggots.

Re:Plato

[eleuthero]

Clear sealable glass didn't exist for quite some time, the Romans/Egyptians used it for mosaics and jade-like jars most of the time and even wine was usually put into bags made of treated animal matter if you go back far enough.

Re:Plato

[eleuthero]

I want to know which turtle we're on--is it the one on top or are we wedged somewhere in the middle... if there is a middle, as I recall, it's turtles all the way down.

Re:Plato

[AKAImBatman]

Semantics nothing. Platonic Solids was simply an incorrect line of reasoning. Solids vs. Gases vs. Liquids vs. Plasmas are all the same elemental materials. The difference is in the amount of energy in the system. Plato thought they were fundamentally different particles with fundamentally different microscopic shapes.

Re:Plato

[lenester]

Science as we know it today was pretty much invented by Sir Francis Bacon, a philosopher. It unifies large swaths of epistemology and ontology, thereby rendering much of the field of philosophy entirely obsolete. That the vast majority of so-called philosophers haven't figured this out after 400+ years is one of my largest peeves with academia because, as a direct result of their masturbatory inertia, philosophy has been pushed into an intellectual corner.

So I don't blame you for not understanding that all science is properly a subset of philosophy. Most philosophy professors I've met don't really understand that either. :(

Re:Plato

[jefu]

Nah, just writing its digits base 13.

Re:Plato

[poopdeville]

A better example are the different interpretations of quantum physics. They are "interpretations" because they take the mathematical theory and try to form a conceptual model for it.

Re:Plato

[masdog]

How do you know we're not on the back of a giant robot?

Re:Plato

[Procrasti]

Close, the actual neocon approach is:

people were only seeing a shadow of reality and it was up to politicians to declare war on shadows.

Re:Plato

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Science starts with the proposition that the Universe is rational and can be observed in a rational and repeatable manner.

This is not so much a "proposition" as it is the baseline, default, common-sense observation based on our own experiences. I pick up the rock, I drop it, the rock falls to the ground. I pick it up and drop it again, and again it falls to the ground. Etc. We learn this from infancy, long before either "science" or "philosophy" enter our heads. Everything else -- all the layers of mysticism which philosophers and theologians have over the millennia attached to our perceptions of reality, and all the hypotheses which scientists have floated over the last few centuries -- falls into the category of "propositions in need of testing, otherwise worthless." But the fundamental difference between science and philosophy is that scientists' propositions can be and are tested, and discarded if found wanting, while philosophers' remain no matter how little use they may be in describing the real world.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

You can trust the observation. It's possible you'll interpret it differently depending on what assumptions you use. What would it matter if it was an illusion, if there's no measurable difference?

Re:Plato

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The philosophy of science, when done right, is about two things: first, learning the rules of logic (a subject which unfortunately is not generally taught below the college level) and how they can be applied to science, and second, discussion of the ethical dilemmas which scientists may face and how to resolve them. These are very different from what might be called the "philosophical worldview" in which one starts with unalterable axioms, not subject to modification based on observation, and attempts to reason from there about the workings of the natural world.

Re:Plato

[RufusFish]

I'm not sure I'd characterize Aristotle as 'lesser known'.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a difference between what Plato said and how his ideas influenced our perception. Plato's Cave allegory described a hierarchal structure to reality. Any time you see hierarchic layers of complexity in Science you can thank Plato for getting the ball rolling. For developing the needed language and ideas.

While it is dangerous to confuse philosophy with physics it's also dangerous to think they stand independently of each other. The cognitive structures that philosophy has imparted are implicit in the world of Mathematics, Science, and society at large.

Re:Plato

[Toonol]

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the two fields don't have a strong influence on each other. I think part of the reason we've stalled out on some fundamental physics problems is that we haven't ironed out the philosophical underpinnings of them.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

Liquid crystals are liquid and solid.

Re:Plato

[damn_registrars]

I'm not sure I'd characterize Aristotle as 'lesser known'.

Between Plato and Aristotle, when considering who is better known, ask yourself this question. Which one has a name that many people cannot distinguish from a children's toy?

Re:Plato

[TheLink]

There's also the very first observation I think everyone makes = consciousness.

I can't prove that everyone makes it though ;).

Re:Plato

[Ardeaem]

Physics is a subset of philosophy.

No, it's really not.

I hate to be so blunt, but you don't know what you are talking about. Until very recently, science was called natural philosophy. All the sciences have their origins in philosophy, and anyone who ignores this does so at their own peril (and shows their ignorance of both science and philosophy).

I say peril because it is easy to take empirical science for granted. Empiricism is an epistemological position that must be defended, and to ignore the fact that science is a branch of philosophy is to forget how fundamental epistemological assumptions are to science.

Knowledge in science doesn't just happen. You don't observe theories or laws, and even observation itself is tricky. To say that science is about observation is to be way too glib about science. Science is much, much more complicated than that, and deserves much more respect and reflection than you give it.

You see, most philosophers understand that. Many scientists don't. Even fewer nonscientists understand it.

I don't say any of this to belittle science; I am a scientist. I say it because science is much more complicated than "observation," and seeing it as a proper branch of philosophy recognizes that.

Re:Plato

[andersa]

That fact that it is working is argument enough for it's validity.

Re:Plato

[KDR_11k]

Science uses theories as tools to describe the universe in a productive manner. It does not aspire to find some absolute truth and while it may indeed be possible that a theory is incorrect and that a more complex theory with the same results is correct it doesn't matter as the theories are equivalent for practical purposes and choosing the simpler one is easier. Also simply exploring alternatives is useless unless you have a way to tell when an alternative is more correct, without that you can't decide between two theories and replacing the accepted one can very well end up replacing the correct one with a wrong one.

What you say about finding an alternative that can then be tested isn't really an alternate solution, it's an extension of an existing one (unless it conflicts with the old one in which case proving the new one would disprove the old). How would philosophy actually help a scientist? Looking for meaningful alternatives already happens and I have a feeling you're thinking about some of the more abstract claims of philosophy (like "is reality just a dream?" or other unprovable concepts).

Re:Plato

[Daniel Dvorkin]

No, science starts with the acceptance of the scientific method as a way to determine the "truth".

When you say "the scientific method," you're sweeping under the rug a whole collection of methods, all of which have been tested and modified for centuries, many of which have been discarded along the way when something better comes along, and which vary greatly from field to field. IOW, there is no "scientific method" -- there is a collection of methods generally agreed upon by scientists as the result of long experience.

It presupposes the accuracy of our senses, the non-arbitrariness of the universe, and even the notion that there is an external universe to study at all.

As I replied to another poster in the thread, this is the default assumption based on our experiences from infancy, and there is no reason to assume otherwise. Mystics love trying to poke holes in our perceptions of reality, but they do so without offering any evidence for their claims.

While many philosophic systems rest on axioms, those axioms are not arbitrary. They are invented, or discovered, because they logically explain the experiences of the philosopher.

Ah, but (good) scientific hypotheses logically explain the experiences of everybody, that's the difference. Philosophers' axioms may make sense to them and to people who think like them, but they fail in general applicability.

Philosophers use the scientific method to determine the axioms which underlie their systems.

Please, tell us about the methods of the science done by Aristotle, or Augustine, or Wittgenstein!

Without philosophy, there would be no way to argue that the scientific method was valid at all.

Only if you define "philosophy" so broadly that the word loses any meaning. In the real world, the best argument for science is that it works; it produces useful results. Philosophy has never cured a disease, or built a computer, or shown us anything in the universe beyond what we can see with the naked eye. Science has done all of these things and more, and will continue to do so.

Re:Plato

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Doctoral degrees carry the title "PhD" as a result of a historical artifact. That's all. "Bachelor" and "Master" are equally artifactual.

If you define all human thought as philosophy, then the word is so broad as to be meaningless. What do you call that field which is practiced by the people we generally call "philosophers?"

Re:Plato

[Daniel Dvorkin]

That basic assumption of science, as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, is our default view of the world, based on our experiences from the moment we're born. Any other assumption, such as the non-observability or non-causality, is an extraordinary claim which needs to be backed up by some pretty solid evidence -- something which philosophers and other mystics are notoriously unwilling to provide.

Re:Plato

[Daniel Dvorkin]

How do you know what your observing isn't all an illusion?

Because I'm a thinking being engaged with the world around me, not a navel-gazing mystic.

Re:Plato

[Daniel Dvorkin]

While I won't argue with you that science was largely invented by philosophers (and of course I agree entirely that it has rendered large swathes of previously philosophy obsolete) I disagree entirely that this historical curiosity makes it a subset of philosophy. Like many intellectual fields, it's grown far beyond its roots. By way of analogy, modern science is no more a subset of philosophy than modern literature is a subset of epic poetry.

Re:Plato

[Experiment 626]

Physics is a subset of philosophy. No, it's really not.

For centuries, physics was a subset of natural philosophy, which was a subset of philosophy, and pondering how the natural world worked was done by philosophers like Aristotle.

Re:Plato

[daeley]

What do you call that field which is practiced by the people we generally call "philosophers?"

I think the current parlance is "food preparation technicians."

Re:Plato

[digitalunity]

You can't know for sure. Both philosophy and science depend on assumptions. In science, our assumptions are based on experimentation.

Basically, from each basic experiment we gain knowledge that defines even more assumptions to experiment upon further. Over time we build a cathedral of knowledge like a house of cards where each more complicated piece of knowledge is based on observations from previous experimentation. When a fundamental assumption changes, the whole house of cards is in danger of falling down.

There are very basic differences about assumptions in philosophy and science and shouldn't really be discussed together. Unless of course we find where god parked his car, then I welcome anyone to discuss philosophy and science at the same time.

Re:Plato

[memco]

You can't say that because if there was no Philosophy our entire universe would be different. We changed it by using Philosophy.

Re:Plato

[spiralx]

Bose-Einstein condensates? Superfluids? Amorphous solids? There's at least a dozen states of matter.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

When you say "the scientific method," you're sweeping under the rug a whole collection of methods, all of which have been tested and modified for centuries, many of which have been discarded along the way when something better comes along, and which vary greatly from field to field.

How can the scientific method be tested and modified without some external framework in which to value them? How can you evaluate which method is "better" without some way to rank them? To do this, you need a philosophical underpinning to make that value judgment.

As I replied to another poster in the thread, this is the default assumption based on our experiences from infancy, and there is no reason to assume otherwise.

Just because it is the default assumption, doesn't mean its correct. Should we be limited in all our endeavors, to the basic and oversimplified infantile way of thinking? Are you saying its not even worth thinking about?

Philosophers' axioms may make sense to them and to people who think like them, but they fail in general applicability.

I don't know what it is you think philosophers do, but just randomly creating axioms is not it. Philosophers are constantly comparing the results of their theories against their perceptions, and modifying them if need be. You are grossly oversimplifying the practice of philosophy.

There have always been a subset of philosophers who spend their entire lives counting the angels on the heads of pins; but there is real, important work being done on many issues. The philosophy of science is just one example. You have no way to judge whether your "scientific method" is worth pursuing without philosophy; even a philosophy as basic as your common-sense approach.

Re:Plato

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Until very recently, science was called natural philosophy.

And now it's not.

All the sciences have their origins in philosophy, and anyone who ignores this does so at their own peril (and shows their ignorance of both science and philosophy).

The historical roots really aren't the point; as I pointed out to another poster in the thread, many intellectual fields have outgrown their roots, and modern science is no more a subset of philosophy than modern literature is a subset of epic poetry.

I'd be rather careful about saying "all the sciences," BTW. Astrology led rather directly to astronomy, and alchemy to chemistry -- and while both of these brands of mysticism certainly had philosophical elements, neither was really "philosophy" in the modern understanding of the word.

Empiricism is an epistemological position that must be defended

The only defense that need be made of empiricism is that it works. Attempts by mystics to undermine this are ceaseless, but doomed. I'm not going to bother retyping my own words; please take a look at some of my posts higher up the thread.

To say that science is about observation is to be way too glib about science. Science is much, much more complicated than that, and deserves much more respect and reflection than you give it.

I never claimed that science is only about observation, any more than I claimed that philosophy is only about axioms; I merely pointed out that these are the places where the respective fields start. And after that, as I acknowledged, the thought processes of scientists and philosophers are often quite similar. But the starting point makes an enormous difference in the outcome.

Believe me, I give science a lot of "respect and reflection" every day. In fact, I probably ought to stop noodling around on /. and get back to work ...

Re:Plato

[macklin01]

Please don't confuse philosophy and physics. They are two separate fields. The physics here is suggesting that the Universe might behave. Plato was commenting on the difference between human perception and reality.

Careful, though. There's a reason the degree is called a "Ph.D. / Doctor of Philosophy": the modern physical sciences descend from natural philosophy. Indeed, Newton, Leibniz, and Descartes were all active philosophers as well as mathematicians and physicists. Even today, there's a great deal of intersection between philosophy, mathematics, and physics. (e.g, model theory, Gödel, examining group theory to get new ideas on theoretical physics, which tie into modern philosophy on the observable universe, etc.)

Re:Plato

[pla]

That basic assumption of science, as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, is our default view of the world, based on our experiences from the moment we're born.

Saying "We basically experience the world as it really exists" amounts to one pretty serious assumption, whether or not you want to call it that.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. While logic is very important to scientific methodology, so are issues such as: precision and accuracy, verifiability, falsifiability, quantum measurement theory, subject-object relations, etc. The lessons of logic lead us into model theory, which very quickly becomes conceptually entangled with metaphysics and "interpretations" of science. (For example: the Everett interpretation of quantum physics is a conceptual model of quantum physics. There are others, such as the Copenhagen interpretation. None is "more right" than the other, but some might be more conceptually attractive than others. Considerations like this are why "theories" like superstring theory are in fact very fruitful, despite being "unfalsifiable".[1] It is important that scientists understand these issues, or you end up with otherwise respectable scientists

[1] That's not even true. It is as falsifiable as quantum E&M and general relativity are, since it takes those as its basis.

Re:Plato

[lenester]

You're putting the philosophical cart before the scientific horse. It comes down to definitions, I suppose. As I'm using the term, philosophy is very explicitly defined as the superset of all pursuits to understand the natures of things. Likewise, literature is defined as the superset of all forms of storytelling. Epic fits within literature. Science fits within philosophy. Your analogy commits an inversion of scale, at least according to my understanding of the terms (which I contend is well-informed, but at the same time the terms have gotten rather muddied through the centuries).

Basically, what you say holds true if philosophy is simply a primitive form of science. Those of us arguing against you don't believe it is. :)

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

I pick up the rock, I drop it, the rock falls to the ground. I pick it up and drop it again, and again it falls to the ground. Etc.

How many times do you have to repeat that before you can come to the conclusion that the rock will fall to the ground whenever you drop it? That's a philosophical question. There is no way to develop a theory from a finite series of observations, without using induction. And I don't see any reason that you should accept the principal of induction without some philosophizing.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly are not a deep thinker.

Re:Plato

[khellendros1984]

Plato had a thought experiment, to which the previous poster was referring. Imagine prisoners chained to a wall. They've been there their entire lives, and all they can see is the shifting shadows on the wall as people move across the light leading into their dungeon. Those shadows are a reflection of reality, but they themselves aren't reality. One day, one of the prisoners gets free and is able to go outside. He comes back in, describing the world outside to his brethren, but they consider his story to be fictional. After all, everyone can see that reality is made up of shadows shifting on the wall.

Re:Plato

[DittoBox]

What does 2+2 equal, Winston?

Re:Plato

[genner]

In science, our assumptions are based on experimentation.

Not true. Several assumptions have to be made before experimentation is possible. The scientifc method itself is an assumption.

Re:Plato

[CarpetShark]

Please don't confuse philosophy and physics. They are two separate fields.

Sorry, I don't subscribe to that philosophy.

Re:Plato

[jeff4747]

It's incredible to my mind (inconceivable! :-P) that for all the intelligence and know-how of the ancient world, no one worked out a simple experiment to prove or disprove spontaneous generation!

Given the technology available to the ancient world, how would they conduct such an experiment?

As it is, such an experiment was not conducted until the Renaissance, when glass containers could be made to conduct such an experiment.

Back during the era of the ancient Greeks, there really wasn't anything like an airtight seal, and they had no idea sterilization of the container would be required.

Re:Plato

[Ardipithecus]

If it's 42 we know it's the wrong answer

Re:Plato

[Have Brain Will Rent]

How the hell does

Because I'm a thinking being engaged with the world around me, not a navel-gazing mystic.

get modded insightful 3??? It isn't insightful, it's an avoidance of the question being asked. Even if you read into the comment meaning that isn't there, but might reasonably be thought to have been intended, it still isn't insightful. Sheesh.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

I try to avoid hiring scientist with this attitude for 2 reasons. They tend to reject perfectly valid results because they are so sure that their own view of things is correct. They have what amounts to a social ineptitude that makes it very unpleasant to work with them. People like this give science a bad name because of their attitude of worship of science. I dislike them more than holy rollers.

Re:Plato

[AKAImBatman]

No sterilization was necessary to catch mice in the grain. All they needed was a proper podium with counter-measures against mice reaching the grain. Since they were already familiar with the reproductive cycles of humans and most animals, it only made sense that such an experiment should be tried.

I'll grant you that maggots from meat would have been harder to disprove, but after disproving the mice theory it would have taken little time to observe the lives of maggots, understand that they became flies, then make the connection that the flies were landing on the meat and reproducing in some form.

Airtight jars were only necessary to understand microscopic concepts like spores, fungi, and pathogens. (Even then, I don't doubt they could have found suitable experiments if they put their minds to it.)

Re:Plato

[zehaeva]

No one writes jokes in base 13 >>

Re:Plato

[DamnStupidElf]

How many times do you have to repeat that before you can come to the conclusion that the rock will fall to the ground whenever you drop it? That's a philosophical question. There is no way to develop a theory from a finite series of observations, without using induction. And I don't see any reason that you should accept the principal of induction without some philosophizing.

You only have to repeat experiments until you can rely on the outcome enough to survive and reproduce. Absolute truth is not necessary for survival, only statistical relevance. If I can be 99.9% sure that rocks fall when released above the ground, I will try to avoid heavy rocks being released above my head regardless of whether there's any Universal Truth or Falsehood to general relativity.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

You only have to repeat experiments until you can rely on the outcome enough to survive and reproduce.

That's a philosophical statement. You made a philosophical choice to make survival and reproduction your standards. You didn't have to pick that. You could have said anything at all. But, no matter your standard for induction, you had to make the choice, one way or another. And you did that using philosophy.

Re:Plato

[DamnStupidElf]

Why would they need to? There were "experiments" going on all the time in the ancient world, just as there are in refrigerators all over the planet today. A piece of food would get left somewhere, and when it was found again, it would be covered with mold, maggots and flies. It was obvious.

So how would they explain food preservation like salting/smoking/drying meats, or storing grain in dry places?

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be thinking, but you aren't rational.

Imagine a universe in which everything imaginable and unimaginable is happening at all points in time and space. The nature of this universe is such that we only experience those events which can be explained within our own subconscious model of the universe.

Rational thinkers cannot disprove such a universe because they will only experience those events which can be rationally explained. Therefore, rational thinkers will conclude that we may or may not be living in such a universe. They must take it as an article of faith (i.e., an axiom) that what they observe is not only real, but is the true nature of the universe.

Re:Plato

[DamnStupidElf]

Photons? Neutrinos? Quarks?

Re:Plato

[RufusFish]

"One of his disciples, the lesser-known Aristotle" means something wholly different than "one of his lesser-known disciples, Aristotle." As written, he's comparing the notoriety of the disciples. I think it's safe to say that, of Plato's disciples, Aristotle is the most well-known.

Re:Plato

[chrisG23]

Science begins with some rules before any observation is made. It is very useful to me to see science as a reality/experience filter. It divides reality/experience into two simple categories. The first category is is this reality/experience physically observable (that is with some sort of physical device?) Is it measureable in some meaningful way? Can it be repeated/reproduced? Will another scientist be able to independently recreate this, and get the same observations and same measurments? If the answer is yes, then this thing/reality/experience IS scientific. The opposite of this is this thing/reality/experience IS NOT scientific. Amazing insights and connections and knowledge can be achieved by looking at things scientifically and applying the scientific method. The proof is undeniable. However, "science" can say only one thing about other stuff, and that is that other stuff is UN-scientific. It appears to me that in the process of learning science, most people do not learn that distinction and learn to equate sciene with some concept of truth. Science can say nothing about absolute truth. Science can only make meaningful statements (meaning being relative here) about things that are sciencetific. Again, science can only say that things that are unscientific are just that. Now to place a value on unscientific things relative to scientific things is also meaningless to me. To say scientific things are more valuable than unscientific things to SCIENCE and SCIENTISTS can be said, but parse the sentence and see how much it does not say. Anyway that is my current point of view on science and nonscience.

Re:Plato

[chrylis]

I pick up the rock, I drop it, the rock falls to the ground. I pick it up and drop it again, and again it falls to the ground. Etc.

Until the time when you drop the rock, it hits the ground, and it flies a hundred feet overhead. That's about what happened in the gold-foil experiment, and it goes to show that what you think you know may be entirely useful, just like Newtonian mechanics... but you may not understand fully what's happening.

Re:Plato

[Attila Dimedici]

You say that philosophers start with axioms and scientists start with observation. So, I guess that means that you don't think it is important to scientists that "if a+b=c and d+e=c, then a+b=d+e". That is an axiom. It is one of the basic axioms of math. Without it, science is very hard to do.

Re:Plato

[KDR_11k]

No, turtles all the way down was the answer to "what does the turtle stand on". Pratchett's answer was "it's a turtle, it swims!"

Re:Plato

[Ardeaem]

Until very recently, science was called natural philosophy.

And now it's not.

You missed the point. I wasn't making the claim that just because it was called "natural philosophy" that means science is philosophy. My point was that you should think about the REASONS why it was called natural philosophy. Who cares what we call it now?

Observation is not the core of any science. Although observation is important, it is not a sufficient condition for science. To understand science, you have to understand how theories are built and defended. We don't OBSERVE the laws of motion. We don't observe natural selection. We don't observe relativity. These are theories to explain observations. How we go from observation to real, meaty scientific knowledge is where the real interesting part is, and that requires philosophy. You can't just take it for granted because it "works" (after all, that would be circular, wouldn't it?)

Re:Plato

[khallow]

These are very different from what might be called the "philosophical worldview"

No, by definition the philosophy of science is a part of philosophy. Certainly, logic and ethics are subcategories of philosophy. The "self-evident" axioms and resulting tripe is a common disease of philosophy, but it's not "the" philosophical worldview.

Re:Plato

[bigstrat2003]

How the hell does

Because I'm a thinking being engaged with the world around me, not a navel-gazing mystic.

get modded insightful 3???

You must be new here. Some of the people who moderate are petty, petty abusers of power. Express a sentiment they agree with, even in a completely flamebait fashion, and you get modded up. Express a sentiment they disagree with, even if you're reasonable about it, and you get modded down.

Fairness and the slashdot moderation system don't have much in common.

Re:Plato

[router]

Because the moderators haven't read Hegel.
Logic is the nothing from which something comes.

andy

Re:Plato

[MemoryAid]

Often when I get into intractable arguments like this, it turns out in the end that the disagreement boils down to differing definitions of a specific word. In this case, I suspect it is 'philosophy'. Merriam Webster has a few definitions, of which 'pursuit of wisdom' would probably satisfy those lumping science in with philosophy. On the other hand, 'a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means' would tend to exclude science.

It probably doesn't matter in this forum which definition you use; what matters most on the internet is that the other guy is wrong. (And if you think I'm talking about you, I'm not. It's the other guy who's actually wrong. We are right-on here. Yes sir! Go us. we rock.

Re:Plato

[potatog]

In universe hologram what we perceive as a real object is actually a projection of its shadow. We need another few thousand years to make full circle.

Re:Plato

[Luyseyal]

Cause proper storage prevented unwanted generation.

-l

Re:Plato

[againjj]

Computer science once was a branch of mathematics, and people get PhDs in CS because people got PhDs in math. Math once was a branch of philosophy, and so people get PhDs in math because that's what they got in philosophy. Similarly with every other field that gives PhDs. Things like MDs, DDs, DDivs, etc. grew up independently, and so have different names.

Re:Plato

[Lije Baley]

Scientific thinking natural in humans. We learn about reality through our interaction with it and we empirically create models consistent with reality. These models are the basis for our exceptional ability to adapt. We use them to predict, plan, and build -- and when they don't work we change them. Eventually they work very well. Pragmatically speaking, our models come into alignment with reality. Philosophy, mathematics, and any other attempts at rational thought all develop from the same basic practical needs to survive in and adapt to a complex and changing environment. Some types of philosophical thinking may not have direct, practical, testable applications but they may help us create higher-level models in which to integrate our counter-productive, vestigial fears.

Re:Plato

[dragonjujotu]

While "PhD" is certainly a historical artifact, human thought isn't as broad a category as you make it out to be. Philosophy is how we think and perceive the way we are thinking and perceiving as paradoxical as it sounds. See recursion.

Re:Plato

[diablovision]

I disagree. I don't think that the existence of objective reality is necessarily an axiom of Science. The repeatability of experiments on this potentially existing world, meaning they have the same results across human experience, suggests that this external world does actually exist. Suggests, but does not prove. So, you could call this a theory and not necessarily an axiom.

To be accepted into science, a theory doesn't have to be true, it just has to be predictive and testable. And I think that external reality would fit into that category. Accepting it as true doesn't make it an axiom, no more than accepting The Theory of Evolution makes that an axiom either.

So the theory that objective reality exists is universally accepted as true in Science, but that doesn't make it an axiom unless it is untestable.

Re:Plato

[atraintocry]

Funny that you mention worldviews, the title of the book we used for my philosophy of science course was in fact Worldviews.

http://books.google.com/books?id=cI1PyYvVofAC

Re:Plato

[amRadioHed]

It was a fine response, but if you want something less snarky the answer is it doesn't matter. Scientists are interested in learning how to model the world that we can observe. If all that we observer is an illusion, or a computer simulation or whatever it still has rules of behaviour and so the scientists job of figuring out those rules is not effected.

This would change if somehow whatever is outside the simulation could be observed, but until we have reason to believe that is the case it is purely a question for philosophers and theologians to ponder.

Re:Plato

[tenco]

No, physics is an outlet of philosophy. That happened when we found the means to actually test hypotheses about non-living objects and began to realize what we were talking about.

Re:Plato

[Dutch Gun]

How the hell does

Because I'm a thinking being engaged with the world around me, not a navel-gazing mystic.

get modded insightful 3??? It isn't insightful, it's an avoidance of the question being asked. Even if you read into the comment meaning that isn't there, but might reasonably be thought to have been intended, it still isn't insightful. Sheesh.

I suppose maybe because it's an acknowledgment, however unsubtly expressed, that there's a degree of impracticality inherent in the notion of questioning fundamental principles of our existence and universe that doesn't really help the advancement of hard science. For instance, questions such as whether or not the universe actually exists, or whether I'm the only real being in the universe and all of you are illusions or very clever algorithms don't have much practical application when you get right down to it. Science has, arguably, improved our lives in very real and very practical ways. It's a bit harder to make that case for philosophy.

As such, I tend to view the relationship between modern science and philosophy as rather flimsy at best. Or, put another way, I suppose you could say is that science is about finding answers to interesting questions, where philosophy seems mostly delight in coming up with interesting questions and scenarios to which no one can come up with a reasonable answer.

Re:Plato

[Prof.Phreak]

...difference between human perception and reality.

I think the point of `universe as hologram' is exactly that there's no reality without perception, which is limited by how many photons hit your detector.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I'm a thinking being engaged with the world around me, not a navel-gazing mystic.

You must be a blast at parties.

:set sarcasm off

Re:Plato

[tenco]

It presupposes the accuracy of our senses, the non-arbitrariness of the universe, and even the notion that there is an external universe to study at all.

(Disclaimer: I don't know what exactly you mean by "external" or if you have covered this by "non-arbitrariness")

This reality (universe) also has to be an objective (aka mind-independent) reality.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

(Disclaimer: I don't know what exactly you mean by "external" or if you have covered this by "non-arbitrariness")

I meant that the universe is "external" of one's own consciousness; that you are a part of it, not the other way 'round. Non-arbitrariness is the assumption that the universe doesn't change the rules in a random or non-deterministic manner between experiments.

Re:Plato

[atraintocry]

Philosophers use the scientific method to determine the axioms which underlie their systems.

I would argue that the tools of philosophers are much more general, following logical rules and things like induction and deduction.

Re:Plato

[klui]

Guess that's why a Ph.D stands for doctor of philosophy?

Re:Plato

[atraintocry]

Amen. There is a real danger in overgeneralizing these things.

FWIW I think the allegory of the cave is a better match for hidden variable theories regarding QM.

As others have said, it's primarily a story about how enlightenment can isolate you from others, and why learning is necessary for society. But if you interpret it as [what we see] vs. [what is really there] then you can find plenty of things in physics to fit that bill.

Re:Plato

[moxley]

>>You must be new here. Some of the people who moderate are petty, petty abusers of power. Express a sentiment they agree with, even in a completely flamebait fashion, and you get modded up. Express a sentiment they disagree with, even if you're reasonable about it, and you get modded down.

You must be new here :) Some of the people in any undertaking are petty assholes, but Slashdot has meta-moderation, which seems to be the best way to deal with that in a way that is as fair as possible. I only wish I could meta-moderate in real life - politicians, television, comments made by my girlfriend... The other thing is that pretty much everyone can become eligable to moderate; it's not some elitist core.

Re:Plato

[bigstrat2003]

You must be new here :) Some of the people in any undertaking are petty assholes, but Slashdot has meta-moderation, which seems to be the best way to deal with that in a way that is as fair as possible. I only wish I could meta-moderate in real life - politicians, television, comments made by my girlfriend... The other thing is that pretty much everyone can become eligable to moderate; it's not some elitist core.

No, I know about meta-moderation, and how the moderation system works... I've moderated a few times myself, and used to meta-mod all the time until they fucked up the interface for it. Still, though, even with that supposed check, petty abuses of power run rampant, so it doesn't seem to be doing its job very well.

Re:Plato

[modmans2ndcoming]

yes

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

Without philosophy, there would be no way to argue that the scientific method was valid at all.

Except of course the obvious continual success of science in explaining the natural world. Notice that your computer keeps getting faster... that *could* be luck I suppose...

Re:Plato

[Have Brain Will Rent]

I don't disagree with your comment, or your analysis of the intent of the other comment - although I'm not sure that there are no practical, or other, benefits to asking inherently unanswerable questions. And yes I agree "Science" has improved our lives in very real and practical ways - I think it is not so clear we should extend that realization to then thinking that science should only ask practical questions or even questions that are practical to answer. The question asked by a theorist today may be practical to answer a century from now and the path from now to then could be very interesting.

For example it seems to me that despite being "only" a philosopher Zeno had something to offer mathematicians and physicists for many centuries and we are still wrestling with the different implications of a continuous or discrete universe. I also think interesting questions that seem to have no reasonable answer may have something to tell us about the fundamental nature of the universe - or the fundamental limitations of human cognition. One of the significant differences between science and philosophy is that while science primarily limits itself to asking "what happens" philosophy does not adopt that restriction.

But anyway, to drag this back to my original objection, when one person asks:
How do you know what your observing isn't all an illusion?
the response:
Because I'm a thinking being engaged with the world around me, not a navel-gazing mystic.
isn't insightful or an answer to the question that was asked. But it is not that response that bothers me. I am bothered by the moderators thinking insightful a response that basically boils down to "because I choose not to believe that". Ahhhh, maybe I'm just extra grumpy today ;)

Re:Plato

[Ingenium13]

I'll second this. Science evolved out of philosophy, especially in the case of biology, which used to be called natural philosophy. In fact, all of what we now consider science was once natural philosophy. Charles Darwin considered himself a philosopher and greatly admired Aristotle. Throughout the Origin of Species and his other works, Darwin often makes Aristotelian references. It was in adhering to Aristotle's focus on teleology that lead Darwin to figure out natural selection. Teleology is still found in modern scientific literature, so science has not lost its roots in philosophy.

When looking at the subset of philosophy called philosophy of science, it becomes more apparently that science really is still just a subset of philosophy. Philosophy is not just people making random guesses about how they feel the world is, but rather it is about using evidence to try to prove one's point. Science is about gathering the data, and then using that data to draw conclusions is philosophy. Science cannot exist without philosophy.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

Except of course the obvious continual success of science in explaining the natural world.

You just made a philosophic choice when deciding how you define scientific success: "explains the natural world". You could have chosen anything. Why that?

Re:Plato

[smoker2]

Not true, you have to form an opinion before you can make an assumption. You do that by experiment.

If you disagree on that then the universe does not exist, scientifically speaking. Without experimentation, you can make no assumptions.

Re:Plato

[rvqbl]

that is very pragmatic of you.

Re:Plato

[smoker2]

But that choice was made using science, not philosophy.

Please don't mistake personal thought for philosophy. Philosophy is about what "I" am rather than about what "it" is. The bigger picture if you will. If your species survive because you act a certain way, that is not philosophical, but trial and error, ie. scientific. No matter what you think...

Otherwise we wouldn't be here. Unless you're God, and we had to believe in you to exist. Are chemicals, chemicals - or only if you think of them as such ? Do you think that matter is just imagination or has it been proved ?

Re:Plato

[smoker2]

Go on, mod me down for this ...

Language changes, get used to it !

tosser ! There is no truth anymore, there are too many assholes who know better. That is why "philosophy" has the same status as science. As I said before, prove it or fuck off. You can say or think anything you like, but without science you're nothing but a looney.

Re:Plato

[smoker2]

Mod parent up !!! Without science, philosophy would be nothing.

Re:Plato

[Hatta]

No, science starts with the acceptance of the scientific method as a way to determine the "truth". It presupposes the accuracy of our senses, the non-arbitrariness of the universe, and even the notion that there is an external universe to study at all.

No it doesn't. The accuracy of our senses is a conclusion we reach after many repeated observations that yield the same result. In fact, science has shown that in many cases our senses aren't accurate.

Further, science would work just as well if the universe were arbitrary. Suppose the entire universe were a simulation in a computer. After all, there's no way to prove it's not. If our universe is a simulation, then it is arbitrary. Whoever wrote it can go in and change any constants or even laws of physics that they want. But wait, science still works. We can still make observations, make predictions based on those observations, make models based on the results of those predictions, and make technology based on those models.

Of course the science we do in a simulated universe won't have anything to do with that actual universe, but it doesn't have to. Science is not about the "truth". It's just a process, and that process can take place without assuming any sort of external reality at all. Even a nihilist can be a scientist.

Re:Plato

[Hatta]

How can the scientific method be tested and modified without some external framework in which to value them?

You can test the scientific method with the scientific method.

How can you evaluate which method is "better" without some way to rank them?

Easy. Which process yields the most useful results? Rank them accordingly.

To do this, you need a philosophical underpinning to make that value judgment.

Not really. I just have to recognize what works and do that.

Re:Plato

[smoker2]

Wine in bags. Is this the sign of getting old ?. Do you realise that a lifetime is nothing in terms of society ? My great-grandmother was born in the late 1890's, and my grandfather has just died. So I represent the 3rd from last in my line (my sister has 3 kids and they have 2 kids between them). It really isn't that far back you know. How much change have you seen in 10 years ? 20 years, 30 years, 100 years ? It is not inconceivable that todays people still have the instincts of their forbears, and so technology is largely irrelevant. You make it seem like the cave men were using "skins" instead of bottles ! How primitive !

Read some history with this perspective and realise how little we as a species have advanced. New toys, sure, but new "philosophy" - no chance.

Re:Plato

[peddamat]

It's funny how modern folks spend so much time laughing at the ancients. If you believe in evolution, you also believe in "spontaneous generation". There was no creator, life spontaneously erupted out of dirt. Where the ancients got it wrong, possibly, is WHEN the spontaneous generation happened.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooo... you need to repeat it 1000 times.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

You can test the scientific method with the scientific method.

You sure can. But, it seems a little circular. If you trust the scientific method to tell you whether the scientific method is valid or not, you probably should trust it for physical sciences. I don't see how that really confirms anything.

Easy. Which process yields the most useful results? Rank them accordingly.

That's called pragmatism. Its a school of philosophy. See that? You just used philosophy to determine how you should go about doing science. See, its not so scary.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

But that choice was made using science, not philosophy.

How so? You have to make a value judgment. Unless you are telling me you have a scientifically justified code of ethics (which would be huge), you had to decide what you value without science. Without that value judgment, you can't do science.

Philosophy is about what "I" am rather than about what "it" is.

If that's what you think philosophy is, you are completely misinformed. Philosophy encompasses metaphysics(what is), epistemology(what I know), ethics(what should I do), aesthetics(art), and politics(how to live with others). What we are talking about falls clearly into the metaphysics and epistemology categories.

If your species survive because you act a certain way, that is not philosophical, but trial and error, ie. scientific. No matter what you think...

Humans are the only animals capable of thinking deeply about their actions. If you think most animals are learning by trial and error, you are incorrect. Humans are the only animals who are capable of enough self-reflection to analyze our actions in such a way. We have to decide how to act; for most animals its simply automatic. Don't you think we should think about it? Or, should we just go on instinct?

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what Winch called the "underlabourer" conception of philosophy (in the Idea of a Social Science). But Doesn't he (Wittgenstein) reject it in the Investigation, and again in the Notebooks?

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

*rimshot*

Re:Plato

[iacvlvs]

the philosophical cart

Descartes, yes?

Re:Plato

[DamnStupidElf]

That's a philosophical statement. You made a philosophical choice to make survival and reproduction your standards. You didn't have to pick that. You could have said anything at all. But, no matter your standard for induction, you had to make the choice, one way or another. And you did that using philosophy.

I didn't pick the standard, the universe did. If you want to argue with the universe, go drop rocks on your head. A philosophical viewpoint will not change reality, and therefore it is possible to make predictions independent of philosophy. If you are a solipsist you might believe otherwise, but it still wouldn't change anything and would in fact lead to a contradiction; if your beliefs influence reality then they *are* reality and no longer philosophy.

Re:Plato

[DamnStupidElf]

Humans are the only animals capable of thinking deeply about their actions. If you think most animals are learning by trial and error, you are incorrect. Humans are the only animals who are capable of enough self-reflection to analyze our actions in such a way. We have to decide how to act; for most animals its simply automatic. Don't you think we should think about it? Or, should we just go on instinct?

You would be proving my point if you weren't wrong. If animals truly could not learn by trial and error, then what I said would be trivially true; animals make some mental/instinctual prediction and whether it comes true or not determines whether they survive. Rats and plenty of other animals have been shown to learn by trial and error, however.

As it is, the major evolutionary difference between humans and most animals is not that they don't think about themselves, but that the thought happens on a different level. Natural selection has the effect of allowing genes to think about their own actions, by actively removing the ones that think poorly. Humans, on the other hand, have the ability to apply the same kind of selection to their thoughts within a single individual.

That said, it's *all* instinct, whether it's animal or human behavior. Human instinct just changes faster, and is not limited to gene propagation for its major changes. To paraphrase, it's survival of the fittest all the way down.

Re:Plato

[blahplusplus]

"And those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers." (Plato, Republic, 380BC)

Philosophy is about the eternal struggle for the truth(tm), anyone who says it isn't seriously has no clue about philosophy. I've read many posts here and I'm quite disturbed at the fact that no one has realized that philosophy is absolutely necessary for science's development - if you're missing the concepts from a system of thought (which is philosophy, how one seperates truths from non truths, and the different levels of truth) then you're not going to get very far.

Re:Plato

[Ardeaem]

Good, I'm glad we agree :) I knew everyone except that other guy was on my side.

Re:Plato

[Boronx]

How can the scientific method be tested and modified without some external framework in which to value them? How can you evaluate which method is "better" without some way to rank them? To do this, you need a philosophical underpinning to make that value judgment.

Let's see: I'm trying to figure out the laws of the universe. If my method takes me down the wrong path and after some time I discover the error, it might by time to review and correct my method.

As I replied to another poster in the thread, this is the default assumption based on our experiences from infancy, and there is no reason to assume otherwise.

Just because it is the default assumption, doesn't mean its correct. Should we be limited in all our endeavors, to the basic and oversimplified infantile way of thinking? Are you saying its not even worth thinking about?

Of course, he didn't say anything of the sort. And if he did, it would be pointless since so many people have already thought much about this and will probably continue to do so.

I don't know what it is you think philosophers do, but just randomly creating axioms is not it. Philosophers are constantly comparing the results of their theories against their perceptions, and modifying them if need be. You are grossly oversimplifying the practice of philosophy.

Any philosopher who looks around himself to test his theories has suddenly transformed into a scientist.

There have always been a subset of philosophers who spend their entire lives counting the angels on the heads of pins; but there is real, important work being done on many issues. The philosophy of science is just one example. You have no way to judge whether your "scientific method" is worth pursuing without philosophy; even a philosophy as basic as your common-sense approach.

So philosophy means just thinking about stuff? Then you're right, it's extremely useful, and we need more people thinking.

Re:Plato

[lenester]

...it's a good pun, do not rant about Descartes. It's a GOOD pun, do NOT...

Re:Plato

[Blobule]

Science has, arguably, improved our lives in very real and very practical ways. It's a bit harder to make that case for philosophy.

That's the problem with not being able to see outside of our reality. If our reality was just turned on a second before you made that statement, then for all considerations of our existence, science is at the exact same stage it was when you popped into existence with a complete repertoire of conjured memories. Consider what happens when you boot up a game and everything is pre-oriented as the game was staged. So too may be true for reality. Given that argument, maybe science has done nothing for us ;)

Re:Plato

[cp.tar]

Our universe is not a joke.

It is more of a tragedy.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

So philosophy means just thinking about stuff? Then you're right, it's extremely useful, and we need more people thinking.

Yes. This discussion we're having about the nature of science, that's philosophy. Pretty much any time you're talking about science, you're talking philosophically. Philosophy doesn't have to be huge theoretical artifices spun from nothing, or complex and vague analogies like Plato's Cave. Why science works is a philosophical topic.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

animals truly could not learn by trial and error, then what I said would be trivially true; animals make some mental/instinctual prediction and whether it comes true or not determines whether they survive. Rats and plenty of other animals have been shown to learn by trial and error, however.

My point was, that animals, even rats, who can learn by trial and error, are not capable of analyzing their actions. They don't choose to learn by trial and error, its instinct. But humans make the choice to learn by trial and error.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Plato's "The Republic" book VII. Usually it's referred to as "Allegory of the cave".

Re:Plato

[MadMidnightBomber]

Science starts with the proposition that the Universe is rational and can be observed in a rational and repeatable manner.

"No such faith comforts the software engineer." -- Fred Brooks

Re:Plato

[lawpoop]

You're misunderstanding this. Novels or other literature were never called "long-form epic poems", or ever categorized as epic poetry.

We can clearly delineate when modern chemistry broke away from alchemy. Although chemistry is a descendant of alchemy, it no longer is a kind of alchemy. That's because chemists took up the scientific method, which is fundamentally different from the tenets of alchemy. They didn't assume that lead could be turned into gold; they just wanted to research and discover the true properties of material. However, "science" never had a fundamental disagreement with any "foundational principles of philosophy" -- scientists rather took up certain positions already within science. Science is a kind of philosophy.

I've read through your posts, and your entire argument about Why Science is not Philosphy seems to be "It's just not". I think you are thinking solely of philosophy as people debating in a coffee shop. Philosophy is much broader than. You do recognize that science is a descendant of philosophy. At what point, exactly, did science break away from philosophy? What even or proclamation heralded "the scientific revolution", when science broke from its philosophical moorings? Is science founded on logical positivism? If you would agree, then you would be admitting that science is based on a philosophical position.

If 'science' is to have any meaning as a practice different from psuedo-science, or esp, or divination, then you have to take a philosophical position as to what constitute knowledge, reason, information, observation, reality, objectivity, etc. Those are philosophical positions; I argue therefore that science is a subset of philosophy. It fits entirely within philosophy's Venn diagram.

Re:Plato

[Hatta]

I'm pretty sure that's just common sense. I don't see how philosophers can take credit for common sense.

Re:Plato

[GWRedDragon]

Saying "We basically experience the world as it really exists" amounts to one pretty serious assumption, whether or not you want to call it that.

That's Ayn Rand's primary axiom... But yes, it is obviously an assumption. The dirty little secret of philosophy of course is that every philosopher has different axioms. Science is simply another branch of philosophy with its own axiom set.

Re:Plato

[VoidEngineer]

Actually, grandparent post and great-great-grandparent post are making references to Book VII of Plato's Republic, and the Allegory of the Cave. Plato goes on for 10 or 15 pages about how we perceive and understand the physical universe around us. Of particular note to this thread is that the Allegory of the Cave is a discussion on light, optics, and shadows (displace of light). Plato suggests that the things we observe in life are the displacement, or the shadow, of a more profound universe. This is slightly different that then notion of perfect forms, which he develops more at length elsewhere. Side poster gives a good summary of the allegory.

Re:Plato

[johnsonav]

I'm pretty sure that's just common sense. I don't see how philosophers can take credit for common sense.

If you don't think about it further or refine the process based on experience, then yes, it is just common sense. One aspect of philosophy is an attempt to define, structure, and analyze the implicit knowledge we call common sense.

If you base your science on unstudied assumptions, which is what common sense is, how can you have any faith at all in the legitimacy of the conclusions you draw? Philosophy seeks to shore up the foundations of science through study, thought, and observation.

Re:Plato

[VoidEngineer]

If we're living 'in a hologram' where we are unable to perceive an extra dimension that exists and affects us, then is it really that different from Plato's example?

One thing to note: In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, he describes human perceptions as shadows of higher-order objects. That is, shadows are displacement of light, by high-order objects. Thus, a shadow can be formally considered as a projection from 3D space to 2D space.

The hologram hypothesis is, in some ways, precisely opposite to what Plato was proposing, in that it's claiming that 3D space is encoded on the 2D surface of some super-universe sphere thingy. That is, 3D space is a projection from 2D space.

Put another way, Plato was suggesting downcasting from N-dimensional to 3-dimensional, whereas the hologram hypothesis is suggesting upcasting from 2-dimensional to 3-dimensional.

Yet, the similarity is striking between the two world views. Plato might not have gotten the particular's right, but he definitely seemed to grok that the world we live in is only a projection of something else.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know that my being the "thinking being" you maybe creating the illusion by observing. You and all the other living beings are creating the visual space that we reside in that we call reality. Bubbles of perception. When the bubbles combine the produce the illusion of the world as a whole.

Man that shit it too deep for a Saturday morning. Think I'll go sit on the porch now and smoke a joint.

Re:Plato

[VoidEngineer]

But what if a Philosopher starts with axioms that are based on observations? Therein is the catch that you're not considering.

Historically, Physics and Philosophy have been considered to be very closely related. However, in the past 100 years or so, there seems to be a meme going around that they're not related and are separate fields. At the undergraduate level, this may be a reasonable distinction, in so far as there are only so many hours of the day, and one has to list classes in a course catalog. But at the more advanced levels, practicing Physics becomes an exercise in thinking and philosophizing about how the world works. That is, Physicists use philosophical and analytic reasoning to judge their observations and create hypothesis and theorems from them.

Also, for what it's worth, I have a degree in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Chicago. And, having taken a number of classes on the history of science from a University that has done it's share of physics research, I'd have to agree with the grandparent. It's a subtle distinction of ontology and taxonomy, but Physics is generally considered a subset of Philosophy by those who study this particular topic for a living. And lastly, as evidence that Physics is a subset of Philosophy, I'd point out the type of degree that is awarded to the most advanced practitioners of physics:

PhD Physics = Doctorate of Philosophy in Physics.

Re:Plato

[VoidEngineer]

Science also starts with a value-proposition, in regards to the Goedel incompleteness theorem, in that it values a consistent set of rules rather than a complete set of rules.

Re:Plato

[VoidEngineer]

Again, as mentioned elsewhere, Science is a subset of Philosophy. To be sure, as a subset, it adds a process of testing and a value-judgement to value consistent explanations. But it's a philosophy unto itself about how the world works. A philosophy with a great many adherents, to be sure. But a philosophy none-the-less.

And, for what it's worth, the idea that the Universe is rational and can be observed in a repeatable manner is not quite as common-sense as one might think based on human experiences. You use the rock analogy and point to gravity as being a common-sense observation. But why the rock example? Why not the winds and clouds? I walk outside and see a cloud. I stand under it. The cloud blows east. I stand under another cloud on another day, and it blows south. Where's the repeatability in that? The rationality? I repeated an experiment, but the universe was not consistent. It was not repeatable in the way that the rock example is. So, while I do agree with you that Science is a pretty nifty concept, I don't think it's as common-sense as it seems. We happen to live in a world where the Scientific Method has become entrenched and new generations of humans are brought up with this concept from infancy. But it wasn't always that way.

Anyhow. There are plenty of philosophers out there who create philosophical constructs about how the world works that can be tested, ranging from Nietzche to Bentham to Rand. But, like Science, you have to subscribe to their system of beliefs, make observations within that system, and judge whether the results are consistent with the world. By the same token, many philosopher's ideas are discarded because they have been found wanting.

Re:Plato

[VoidEngineer]

Science is a subset of Philosophy. Ergo, they were using both.

Science is predominantly concerned with Who, What, When, Where, and How. It does not concern itself with 'Why', which is generally the realm of Religion and Philosophy. But, unlike Religion, Philosophy does not have established dogma. Philosophy can be as maleable as needed. Want a philosophy that is consistent with Science? Fine. Do so. There are no religion dogmas telling you otherwise.

But when you get outside the process of making observations and testing hypothesis to confirm how the world works, you're entering a realm of reasoning that's different than Science. When you start questioning they 'why', as in 'what ought i do based on these results', then you're getting into Philosophy. As grandparent points out, the choice to make survival and reproduction as a standard is a value-judgement. And value-judgements are the realm of Philosophy. To be sure, you can have Philosophies that utilize scientific reasoning, because Science is a subset of Philosophy.

Re:Plato

[VoidEngineer]

If you define all human thought as philosophy, then the word is so broad as to be meaningless. What do you call that field which is practiced by the people we generally call "philosophers?"

The term you're asking about is 'meta-philosophy'. The Philosophy of Philosophy, is what people practice who are generally called 'philosophers'. But lots of people practice plain-old-normal philosophy. Got a PhD? Practicing philosophy. What many people are trying to point out in this discussion is that philosophy is a broad term. It's as broad as the number of people holding PhDs. But it's not a meaningless term, and it has rather specific definitions.

One other poster expressed it very nicely: Philosophy encompasses metaphysics(what is), epistemology(what I know), ethics(what should I do), aesthetics(art), and politics(how to live with others).

Does somebody with a PhD in Physics discuss metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics? Certainly. But so do those people with PhDs in Biology, Art History, Literature, and any number of other areas. You don't have to have a title of Philosopher to practice philosophy, just as you don't have to have the title of Scientist to use the scientific method.

Re:Plato

[VoidEngineer]

Well, to answer your question, in all seriousness, take a look at the Butter Crock, also known as a Butter Bell.
http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/crocks.html

All it requires are two pottery bowls, and some water. The water creates the airtight seal. The trick is that it's only useful for something that's sticky enough to click to the upside down bowl. Hence, it's discovery in application to the storage of butter. It was well known in France by the Middle Ages, and might have conceivably be used as early as the Greek and Roman days. We know that the Greeks understood the concept of buoyancy and the displacement of water with air, by way of Archimedes. They definitely had the technology and understanding of physics to do this kind of experiment.

Regarding germ theory, I'd point out that one of the greek goddesses, Hygeia, daughter of Aesclepius, was known for the healing power of cleanliness. She was supposed to have introduced the idea of washing patients with soap and water, and had lots of hospital shrines. Hence, our modern word 'hygiene'.

My guess is that there were plenty of people who worked out simple experiments that disproved spontaneous generation, particularly within the healthcare community. But lack of printing presses and the difficulty in replicating the experiments led to the results of those experiments not being widely disseminated. Or, possibly, the people performing said experiments didn't realize the scope of what they were testing for.

In hind sight, we can say 'oh, the greeks never worked out a single experiment to disprove spontaneous generation!'. Whereas, would say that they never phrased it in those terms. Rather, they were asking themselves 'why does this butter go bad so quickly?' and 'how can we make butter last longer without spoiling?'. Then, they do some experiments, a couple of them find out that a Butter Bell works to keep butter longer, and it's a practice that's adopted in a couple communities. But without printing presses and mass communications, the concept didn't spread, and was probably rediscovered dozens or hundreds of times, until it caught on permanently in France.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

It is interesting that galaxies form structures much in the same way that atoms do. Woulndn't it be funny to observe that a "galacticule" is actually a universal sized DNA strand?

Just consider the central mass of a galaxy to be similar to the nucleus of an atom and the spiral arms to be the electron shell. And when going the other way, consider the stuff in the electron shell to be similar to a galaxy's spiral arms, but going so fast that it's all a blur and indistinguishable as to its discrete components.

And sometimes I wonder if that the universe itself may be inside a black hole, which is why we can't see beyond it. Likewise there may be yet another equivalent of a smaller uninverse inside the black hole at a galaxy's core. And perhaps even tinier yet inside atoms themselves.

Being that what I've seen of the universe repeats and shows a somewhat fractaline nature in various phenomena at vastly differing scales, I'm not terribly surprised if it is indeed holographic in nature.

But who cares of the pondering of a mere AC here? Carry on as usual.

Re:Plato

[dkf]

Often when I get into intractable arguments like this, it turns out in the end that the disagreement boils down to differing definitions of a specific word. In this case, I suspect it is 'philosophy'. Merriam Webster has a few definitions, of which 'pursuit of wisdom' would probably satisfy those lumping science in with philosophy. On the other hand, 'a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means' would tend to exclude science.

Science used to be called Natural Philosophy, and can still be regarded as a sub-discipline of philosophy. It's just a branch that (largely) takes as axioms that it is sensible and practical to observe the world, perform experiments, and draw conclusions from that activity. It looks like a successful approach to me, but what do I know?

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

> How do you know what your observing isn't all an illusion?

My answer: it does not matter. We simply should define reality as "all we can potentially experience" and "is" as "belongs to reality". but we are unable to escape the universe to check what it "meta-is".
So saying reality is an illusion, reality is a simulation or reality is objective means equally nothing- Reality is, by definition.

The universe is not a hologram. the universe may intimately and ultimately behave like a hologram, and that's what science can get to. If a conway game of life's creature became sentient could one day discover its universe is a grid, correct as far as it can go. But it meta-is a simulation running on a computer and there is no way for it to discover that.

Re:Plato

[genner]

Without experimentation, you can make no assumptions.

The statement above is in fact an assumption.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably a bit late to mention this, but I think a few people may have forgotten that these science practitioners are qualified by their PhD credentials... aka Doctor of Philosophy credentials. Subtle, I know.

Re:Plato

[Anonymous Coward]

"We don't OBSERVE the laws of motion"

In this house we do!

Re:Plato

[im_thatoneguy]

I like to define philosophy as nothing more than logic. The natural sciences are absolutely important to Philosophers because they give us a "Most Likely True" basis for theories.

If you have a grown retarded human with the intelligence of a "statistical" 1 year old human and you have an ape with the intelligence of a "statistical" 2 year old human and you only have time to save one. Who do you save and why?

That's a philosophical question. But the only ways to really rigorously answer it require sufficient data. You could argue that in general intelligence and emotion should be the metrics. In which case the natural sciences need to answer how intelligent each individual is. Or you could argue based on "Pain of Loss" in which case you would need to empirically measure which scenario results in a greater net pain. Or you could argue on "potential" in which case you would need to determine the potential of each individual. Or you could argue it from a position of "Special ordination for humanity." In which case you would need to make an empirical argument for the specialness of humanity. Or you could argue that Aliens decided this millenia ago and that their psychic transmissions tell us to always save the ape--this too would require investigation should we believe it.

All philosophical theories are based on postulates and assumptions. All assumptions are testable. All assumptions are corruptible. The Scientific Method is the best method we've found so far to determine a fact to be true or false. Therefore if a philosopher wishes his philosophy to be useful to the world they would be wise to base it on our best understandings of science.

- Gavin Greenwalt

Re:Plato

[h4rm0ny]

This also reminds me of a comic book called The Invisibles, in which one character explains to another that their universe is in fact a hologram created by the interaction of two realities. The overlap with this story in terms of general concept and terminology is surprising.

Re:Plato

[pseudochaos]

This is definitely on the mark, for physics started out as 'natural philosophy'. However, the more accurate description of what Plato meant is that we are only indirectly observing/sampling reality in that we see the effects (light reflection, the effects in atmospheric pressure [sound], etc) of external objects. The hologram theory fails because:

If the universe were a hologram as devised by intersecting lasers from the 'edge of the universe' (sphere of visible universe) then you'd run into a number of problems.

An extraordinarily easy way to test this: go into a room without windows (basement for instance) and turn on a light. No external light source should be able to penetrate the walls to illuminate the room, and yet light is still possible within this context. Obviously the world isn't a giant hologram.

Also: you'd run into problems illuminating objects close to planets and other large objects, especially with other objects flying ~ overhead. Given our understanding of light, you'd at least see color warping in situations like that. Yet we don't. While things might dim a little bit, artificial light still works even here.

Furthermore: How would you 'draw'/'render' an individual photon? A photon isn't perceptible save from the direction in which it is traveling. Holograms project an image 360^2 degrees (in a 3 dimensional array).

Now on to the experiment itself:
Reasons for slight differences in the output of the laser 'spacetime' ruler: possible angles for escaping concentrated light out of the optical resonator (laser) > 1, therefore there could be slight delays (as the angle of escaping light increases and decreases) in light emission, which would temporarily jolt the output on the end of the 600 metre course. I'm surprised to see people (especially with those credentials) still assuming that lased light is 1 photon across (on the X and Y planes). This further supports my assumption that modern-day physics is a form of sobriety/IQ/etc test.

Another easy explanation: atmosphere has a slight refractive index. See: Gravitational Lensing && Faraday Experiment. Unless all atmosphere was completely evacuated from the confines of the experiment, and it was conducted in a zero gravity environment, it is perfectly reasonable to expect differing output from it. Factor in the non-perfectly-concentrated light output of laser light and it would be extraordinary if *no* differences in output were observed.

Re:Plato

[The_Quinn]

Actually our senses are perfectly accurate, they do not distort anything. It is our interpretation of our senses that may be inaccurate. The fact that a pencil bends in water is not a failure of our senses - it is our senses working according to the laws of physics. How we interpret "pencil bending" may or may not be correct.

Re:Plato

[The_Quinn]

I think it is more accurate to say that science is an application of philosophy. Just as engineering is an application of science.

Re:Plato

[The_Quinn]

I think science is an application of philosophy. Just as engineering is an application of science.

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Well in that case...

"Counselor Troy, please remove your uniform..."

sounds like bullshit to me

[Anonymous Coward]

The average Michael Crawford pushing a baby carriage full of empty cans, collander on his head to keep out the thought police, has better theories.

Let's see if it's true...

[The_Quinn]

"Computer, arch"

...

Nope, not a hologram.

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[mdielmann]

"Computer, arch"

...

Nope, not a hologram.

Who said you had access rights?

"Computer, end simulation."

Always wanted to be a BOFH.

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[Niris]

sudo end simulation gg

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[baKanale]

Who do you think you are? Professor Moriarty?

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[ZorbaTHut]

Or the Holodeck is just broken.

Again.

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Computer, arch"

...

Nope, not a hologram.

YOU'RE a hologram!

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[Chris Burke]

You know what would have been awesome? If we had discovered that the universe is really a holodeck simulation when the actor playing Moriarty in that episode said the line "Computer, arch" and an arch really did appear there in the studio. It just would have been so meta.

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[linzeal]

Put down that hash pipe you star trek geek, we need to get you some mountain dew stat.

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[drinkypoo]

Besides, the Atlantis hash is better. Just ask Peter DeLuise.

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[dotancohen]

Or the Holodeck is just broken.

Again.

_This_ is why FOSS is so important! If the Holodeck were open source, you could file a bug. Just wait until the Debian zealots get in here...

(posted from a Debian-derived OS, mind you)

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[tenco]

sudo: end: command not found
$ sudo simulation-client --terminate --pid=1443675
$

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[wonmon]

So that explains why I keep waking up in this god damn Sherlock Holmes costume...

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[Ken_g6]

Or we're all just holodeck characters, and not allowed access to such things.

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[Ihmhi]

Couldn't we just throw a rock in some random direction and see if it hits a wall?

Re:Let's see if it's true...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only ubuntu-using newbies use sudo. Just use Debian, su -, and then do what you have to do.

Obligatory Star Trek Reference.

[Hordeking]

Commander Riker, this is Captain Picard. We seem to be trapped in a holodeck simulation of the Matrix, and Mr. LaForge has broken his leg because the safeties are off. Can you beam us out?

Re:Obligatory Star Trek Reference.

[jellomizer]

Of course they can't.
The only way to get out is to complete the program. As anything else the Holodeck will interfere with all and only technology used for getting them out. After the program completes everything starts working fine again, so no need to fix it.

Would it fit on a future datapad?

[jerep]

If so I want my own personal universe.

Re:Would it fit on a future datapad?

[morgan_greywolf]

I think that you may already have one.

So...

[sxltrex]

There is no spoon?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

MAN, no wonder I'm always so hungry not long after eating soup. The damn stuff never left the bowl!

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

I drink soup straight from the bowl, you insensitive clod!

Re:So...

[G0rAk]

If you were to look closely enough at it the spoon would begin to pixelate. It is not that there is no spoon so much as the substrate on which the spoon exists is finite.

Re:So...

[nine-times]

Well it seems like the bigger point here is, "there is no 4th dimension." That makes me want to ask, "which dimension is the fake one?"

Re:So...

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

And the cake is a lie?

Re:So...

[Dr Caleb]

So is the grief counselling.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I must've left the seat up again...

Re:So...

[julesh]

Actually, in this case it is. The hologram and the universe that it projects are one and the same, theoretically speaking.

Re:So...

[punkrocher]

it's really just a spatula.

Re:So...

[whopub]

There is no spoon?

It was probably misplaced by one of the turtles...

Re:So...

[Have Brain Will Rent]

I don't think it is the finiteness that is the issue but rather that it is discrete rather than continuous and that the level at which the discrete nature generates observable artefacts is much larger that had heretofore been assumed/predicted.

Re:So...

[dotancohen]

If you were to look closely enough at it the spoon would begin to pixelate. It is not that there is no spoon so much as the substrate on which the spoon exists is finite.

That is already known to be the case. We call those particles "atoms", which are much larger than the Plank scale and so off limits here. This article refers to sub-subatomic particle structures.

Re:So...

[Tubal-Cain]

The first one.

Re:So...

[stainless mac]

---and this is not an apple falling on Newton! Sorry this is not translated into Belgian.

Re:So...

[cybercobra]

Indeed.

Dumb question, I know...

[Anonymous Coward]

But generally speaking, how confident are we (read: Science) that we are actually describing the way the universe truly works, i.e., that we are not simply playing tremendously sophisticated math games? I mean, with string theory, which as I understand it has yet to develop testable hypotheses, and increasingly esoteric findings and theories, I just wonder.... And yes, I know no one said the universe actually had to follow common sense but, again, I can't help but wonder.

Re:Dumb question, I know...

[Goaway]

You could try starting by reading the article, which is mostly about experimental verification of previously untested theories.

Re:Dumb question, I know...

[zappepcs]

With any luck at all, when it is discovered exactly how the Universe truly works, it will be based on a patent applied for by the folks at Xerox PARC and now owned by IBM is being LGPL'd. Soon after, Hollywood will team up with big pharmaceutical companies to produce movie pills that change your reality hologram for a couple of hours for the nominal price of $50/pill. The porn industry will be the innovators once again, producing their own pills that are not restricted to the color white. The first to be released will be a little blue pill, followed by pills with combinations of colors in brown, pink, yellow, etc. Some pills will be very big oblong shapes as well.

The Wachowski brothers will insist they have patent rights, and begin selling blue pills to employers across the globe.

The resultant confusion will cause a work based clusterfuck that rivals even the most intolerable of all-hands meetings known to exist today.

A matrix of possible probabilities from the Heisenberg foundation will be required for you to determine why you are in court on charges of sexual assault on the HR girl, yet the judge is wearing a pink see-through bikini, and your attorney appears to be eating a bowl of ice cream with a bent spoon while ignoring the mayhem in the court room.

Re:Dumb question, I know...

[KDR_11k]

They found empirical data that seems to match a theory that was proposed earlier (so it was not made up in response to the data). I think that puts it ahead of string theory. They're not certain that the noise may not have been caused by other influences that they just couldn't find so far but now that there's a sign that there might be evidence for the theory it's feasible to make more specific experiments to test the claims.

It seems the predicted effect of a holographic universe is that the quantization steps (previously considered to be the Planck length) would be much bigger, they're talking about 10^-16 meters as opposed to 10^-33 meters.

Re:Dumb question, I know...

[Anonymous Coward]

What? What's that you say? Read the article?! Hmm, an interesting proposition, very interesting indeed.... I dare say, my dear boy, you may very well be on to something here...

Re:Dumb question, I know...

[pla]

But generally speaking, how confident are we (read: Science) that we are actually describing the way the universe truly works

In the worst case, you could argue the solipsist point of view, that we can't ever objectively prove that anything exists outside our own mind. So in a very meaningful sense, going beyond even that requires accepting certain basic physical (and philosophical) principles that you can never actually know for certain.

More practically, we can "see" to the level of individual atoms. Below that, very little behaves in a way that makes sense in our 3.5d Euclidean world-view. However, modern physics has built up a pair of useful, predictive models of the behavior of a whole zoo of smaller things (many of which we can't even really call "particles", in the sense of having some fixed material aspect to which we could relate as in some way like rocks or marbles or planets but smaller). Those models, however, only offer one possible interpretation of data far beyond our ability to personally experience and understand.

So in that regard, all of modern physics amounts to little more than a consistent set of equations that work well to describe how our world behaves at the smallest scales... And even then, you'll notice I said we have a pair of models, because we still have a rather drastic middle ground between the scale of atoms and the scale of electrons.

Re:Dumb question, I know...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

But generally speaking, how confident are we (read: Science) that we are actually describing the way the universe truly works, i.e., that we are not simply playing tremendously sophisticated math games?

It's not a dumb question at all, and it's one that scientists in all fields ask themselves often. IANAP, but my field, bioinformatics, is one that is also often accused of "playing math games" without producing testable hypotheses as well, so I'll take a stab at the answer:

We're as confident as we can be given the knowledge we have, no less and no more, but it will always take time to build up confidence in today's leading-edge research, and a lot of it will inevitably be discarded along the way. The only way to judge good science is, ultimately, how well it lasts. WRT physics, we know that Newtonian physics has stood the test of centuries -- we also know that it's wrong in some very important ways, but it's right enough to describe the everyday world we live in to a high level of precision. Einsteinian physics, a hundred years old at this point, is a better approximation, and it describes many extreme conditions in the universe (high speeds, large masses, and huge distances) quite well. Quantum physics, just a little younger, does a good job at the other extreme. These three paradigms put together (often with some effort) and applied to engineering problems form the basis of pretty much our entire technological world. They're all approximations, but if the approximations are good enough, that doesn't matter.

As for string theory, holographic universe, etc. -- who knows? As again in fifty or a hundred years.

Re:Dumb question, I know...

[AKAImBatman]

They found empirical data that seems to match a theory that was proposed earlier (so it was not made up in response to the data). I think that puts it ahead of string theory

Actually, this is a proposed aspect of String Theory according to TFA. So the two appear to be a bit intertwined. (Pun not intended.)

Re:Dumb question, I know...

[Tablizer]

how confident are we (read: Science) that we are actually describing the way the universe truly works, i.e., that we are not simply playing tremendously sophisticated math games?

It's sort of the Epicycles problem again. When they assumed the Earth was the center of the universe, they modeled the solar system using circles "orbiting" circles. They kept adding complexity to the epicycle model with offset bars and more layers of circles. It indeed could be made to make accurate predictions about the movement of sky objects. However, it didn't mirror the actual model (Sun at center). Nobody really knew this until the simpler sun-center model was introduced, and everyone found it was a simpler explanation.

Thus, fitting observations and mirroring the actual underlying mechanism may not be the same thing. Mathematical regression is also an example of this: the regression formulas can be made to model almost any continuous curve if you throw enough terms into them. However, that does not mean that the resulting equation in any way matches the mechanism that generated the actual curve. (Epicycle circles-and-bars are a kind of "circular regression" in a rough sense.)

It's difficult to know if a theory such as String Theory is suffering the same problem. Its complexity does suggest this. But, until a simpler model comes along, it's the current king.
   

Re:Dumb question, I know...

[dotancohen]

Mathematical regression is also an example of this: the regression formulas can be made to model almost any continuous curve if you throw enough terms into them. However, that does not mean that the resulting equation in any way matches the mechanism that generated the actual curve.

Taylor is going to be _pissed_!
http://dotancohen.com/eng/taylor-sine.php

I for one

[Anonymous Coward]

welcome our new holographic overlords

Huh?

[Locke2005]

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.
[checks calendar] No, it's not April yet... that settles it then -- we must be living on a giant potato chip! Precisely the type of universe one would expect a Flying Spaghetti Monster to design!

Re:Huh?

[jae471]

Actually a saddle-shaped universe isn't that far out there.
Shape of the Universe

Re:Huh?

[NoobixCube]

Since I get my stories from the RSS feed, and I only see the headline until I load the story, my first thought was that the Flat Earth Society had come up with another wacky "justification" for their beliefs. Seriously... They believe the moon is fake, to scare people... In the years I've known about them, I still honestly can't tell if they're serious or if they're having a lend of the scientific community. I'm sure there are a few people among them who actually believe what they claim, but I certainly hope the vast majority are members because they think it's a big joke.

Re:Huh?

[Prof.Phreak]

...hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle...

That just means it's 5D space where angles of all the 5D triangles sum up to less than 180 degrees.

Nobody knows whether the real universe is like that.

Okay...

[girlintraining]

Translating dense physics-speak is not my forte, but as I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong -- here goes. Einstein said that gravity is a linear (not discrete) force. What that means is that while it might decrease over distance, the effect never truly becomes zero. I think these guys are saying that it does, in fact, become zero. That is, gravity, contrary to Einstein's relativity equations... is discrete, like a particle, and not all like a wave (that can continue forever). Is that about right?

Re:Okay...

[iluvcapra]

That sounds like a credible description of Quantum Gravity, or rather the big question of quantum gravity, namely, IS gravity a continuous force or is it quantized? Nobody knows if "gravitons" exist.

The issue in this article is that these discontinuous "blurry" fluctuations are much (much much much) larger than a planck length, and this agrees with the assumptions of the so-called holographic principle, and this experiment may not be picking up gravitons so much as it's detecting the blurryness you would expect from a 2-dimensional hologram projected into 3-space. Since the 2-dimensional "horizon" of the universe can only encode information on the scale of a planck length, thus the projection in 3-space within is going to have a much lower information density. I think. I'm not a physicist...

This is all, of course, impossible.

Re:Okay...

[zmooc]

You might be right, but your explanation is not what I understood from the article (but translating dense physics-speak isn't my forte either;-)). What I understood from it is that they've still not been able to measure gravity waves, so we still don't know if gravity behaves like a particle or not. What they're saying, is that space and time might be grainy, and even more grainy than was previously thought and possibly even so grainy that it renders our current attempt of measuring gravity waves futile.

So it's not about gravity being discrete, it's about space and time being discrete, which shows up as a jitter-like noise in the gravity-wave measuring experiment.

Re:Okay...

[Neoncow]

I've heard about these 2-d universes projected onto 3d space before (in some science fiction). Sounds curious.

Anyone know where I can get some non-physicist information on this?

Re:Okay...

[wienerschnizzel]

The idea that everything in the universe is discrete goes back to Max Planck. It's nothing new. What the guys here are saying is that while the 'graininess' that Planck described is a true physical property of the world, the universe that we perceive (or measure with instruments) has much thicker grains than the Planck sizes.

In other words - there is a fine underlying inaccessible Planck reality that convolves into 'our' coarse reality available to our senses and instruments. You can call it a 'hologram' to make it more appealing to the masses - I wouldn't.

Re:Okay...

[Beardo the Bearded]

The jaw-dropping part was towards the end of the article:

"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.'"

It's going to take me a few days to fully realize what that means, and I studied quantum physics.

Re:Okay...

[jd]

Not quite. What they're saying is that space is quantized, which I think was pretty much an inevitable conclusion. Quantum Mechanics has always said that gravity is particle-based (gravitons).

The logic behind space - and therefore time - being quantized is not trivial and it goes well beyond my ability to describe physics, but a hopelessly trivialized attempt to explain follows. It boils down to the fact that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics prohibits any point in space/time from being in a zero state, which means all points have to be occupied by something. That something cannot have any arbitrary value, QM insists all values are quantized, they're discrete values. A particle on that scale exists simultaneously in every place the probability curve permits, which is why particles are waves and waves are particles. Thus, position is not independent of the particle, but a property contained by it, making it subject to the same rules as all other properties, which means it's quantized. Since there is no point in space/time in which there is not a particle, and since all particles have a quantized position, space/time must also be quantized, or you violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Re:Okay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Translating dense physics-speak is not my forte, but as I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong -- here goes. Einstein said that gravity is a linear (not discrete) force. What that means is that while it might decrease over distance, the effect never truly becomes zero. I think these guys are saying that it does, in fact, become zero. That is, gravity, contrary to Einstein's relativity equations... is discrete, like a particle, and not all like a wave (that can continue forever). Is that about right?

To demonstrate how your translation sounds to a physicist, I'll use computer-speak -- here goes. Linus said that the kernel is modular (not microcode). What that means is that while it might bloat over time, the effect never truly ops. I think that these guys are saying that it does, in fact ops. That is, kernel, contrary to Linus's implementation... is microcode, like an interpreter, and not all like a compiler (that can bloat forever). Is that about right?

Re:Okay...

[T.E.D.]

So it's not about gravity being discrete, it's about space and time being discrete, which shows up as a jitter-like noise in the gravity-wave measuring experiment.

So the universe isn't actually analog at all...It's digital. It just looks analog to us due to all the anti-aliasing.

Re:Okay...

[Thelasko]

it's about space and time being discrete

That was my conclusion as well. I think if space and time are discrete, it means gravity must be discrete too, since gravity is just warping of spacetime.

However, this article raises far more questions than it answers. What does this mean for string theory, the Higgs boson, and gravitons? Also, most importantly, what are these guys smoking, and where can I get some?

Re:Okay...

[daeley]

Well, here's a picture to get you started. And here's a description of one related incident.

Re:Okay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. What they're saying is that space is quantized, which I think was pretty much an inevitable conclusion. Quantum Mechanics has always said that gravity is particle-based (gravitons).

So what about general relativity? It does a fairly good job of predicting things without using gravitons. Instead space/time is deformed.

They are describing a plank second(or whatever) as 1 plank length/c. In a gravitational field, this amount of time(relative to the amount of time it takes light to travel the same distance outside of the field), would be longer. The increase in the time it takes wouldn't be a integer multiple of a plank second-unless the granularity for time/space distortion was very large(I have no idea if this would affect the sort of weirdness found in these tests).

Because everything involved is quantized, there would be a common factor for the two measurements of time, but it would be considerably smaller than a plank second.

I probably shouldn't be combining QM and GR like that and I'm probably replying to the wrong person, but it's kinda bugging me. I'm pretty sure this post isn't totally nonsensical, but I'm also pretty sure it is due to me being spectacularly dumb about something.

Re:Okay...

[orclevegam]

The jaw-dropping part was towards the end of the article:

"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.'"

It's going to take me a few days to fully realize what that means, and I studied quantum physics.

First, bear in mind that my physics education isn't much beyond high school level so I may be missing some subtle facet, but that statement makes me think of a Nyquist frequency. It's not so much that there really is a smallest interval of time, just that it's the edge of our ability to measure.

Re:Okay...

[spiralx]

Firstly no information can be lost, so when anything falls into a black hole the information has to go somewhere - and the only thing accessable to the outside universe is the event horizon itself. Information and entropy are related (as entropy is a measure of disorder), and entropy is related to temperature. The conservation of information leads to an explaination of why black holes are hot and emit radiation.

From what I remember on an event horizon the fundamental limit of information storage is 1 bit per area of 2x2 Planck lengths i.e. 4 Planck areas. The total information you can store on any event horizon is therefore much less than the inforation that would be required to specify the entire interior volume down to the Planck length. But that is the limit, so therefore the interior must be specified by much less information i.e. bigger spacetime "pixels". If spacetime is only specified to 2 Planck lengths, then spacetime coordinates require 1/16th as much information to specify as an example.

It's like lossy compression - the more fine detail you sacrifice, the less information is required to specify it. And seeing as we're inside a big horizon due to the speed of light (the horizon of the observable Universe), you can apply the same principle to the Universe as a whole.

This book explains it all much better than I did though :)

Re:Okay...

[Trifthen]

Considering the nature of gravity, it's the medium that's important. I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as a graviton or gravity wave, just areas of distorted space-time. Of course, this implies a theorist could determine the makeup of space-time itself—that granularity or substance that makes up the medium—then negate gravity by inverting the local distortion via directly influencing the medium instead of relying on a mass or energy distortion to "naturally" achieve the effect.

I wouldn't go so far as to immediately suggest "ZOMG simulation!" but it does raise interesting questions if there really is an "aether" that acts as a universal substrate.

Re:Okay...

[spiralx]

The granularity at the Planck scale arises from the fact that at distances and times that small the Uncertainly Principle means that you get virtual black holes constantly forming and evaporating... at that scale things are just a seething sea of singularities rather than flat spacetime i.e. "quantum foam".

Re:Okay...

[spiralx]

Sort of - it's more that it's immeasurable though, as at the Planck scales the Uncertainly Principle means that everything is a constantly changing sea of black holes being created and destroyed, which kind of plays havoc with notions of... well, everything really, up to and including dimensionality - the Universe might have a fractal dimension at this scale...

Re:Okay...

[spiralx]

The point is that at this scale GR totally breaks down - because the uncertainly in the energy of the gravitational field itself is enough to generate virtual black holes at the Planck scale. Or at least that's the naive interpretation, but it does illustrate that we've gone beyond the limits of both GR and QM at that scale.

Re:Okay...

[Luyseyal]

Do you know if the holographic principle designed such that the surface of the "sphere" is the visible universe or somewhere out beyond the locally accessible universe?

I'm just concerned that there might be disagreement between the visible "spheres" in the light cones of two arbitrarily overlapping "spheres". E.g., the light cone of a quasar 11 bn ly away might disagree with the information in our light cone where they overlap.

Curious,
-l

Re:Okay...

[steelfood]

Read Wolfram's "A New Kind Of Science."

While he certainly wasn't the pioneer of the theory, the book does take a good look the idea of a discrete universe.

Re:Okay...

[jd]

GR works great at the macroscopic level, but is lousy at the subatomic level, which is pretty much what you'd expect whether space/time was quantized or continuous. The scale of GR is so fantastically large compared to the granularity, that everything is essentially continuous. In GR, space/time is indeed curved and one of the huge problems with QM gravity is that it cannot be reconciled with GR gravity at the present time. The reconciliation of the two is considered essential for a Grand Unified Theory to exist, and a fair chunk of modern physics only works if you assume a GUT does exist. If the GUT's existance is falsified, that's going to cause a lot of headaches.

So far, that's "textbook" stuff. The next question is whether GR precludes quantized space/time in some other way. The answer is probably no. The equation for relativistic mass is M'=M/(1-sqrt(V^2/C^2)). Both rest mass and relativistic mass are quantized, since mass is supplied in quantized units in the form of the Higg's Boson. The only way you can force M' to hold discrete values is if V also can only hold discrete values. V=S/T (S being the symbol used for displacement, which leads me to believe physicists haven't yet grasped the Latin alphabet quite as well as the Greek one), which in turn means S and T must be constrained, or V would be infinitely variable. If V were infinitely variable, you could convert a mass to energy (E=MC^2) where that energy could NOT be converted back into a mass, because you'd have some non-zero amount of energy left over that did not correspond to a valid Higg's Boson.

(The above paragraph makes the assumption that the Higg's Boson does indeed exist. Iff it does not, GR could permit a totally continuous state.)

Now, can GR's gravity be discrete, using just the notion of curvature in space/time? Perhaps. If I had the answer to that one, I'd be 9/10ths of the way to solving the GUT problem and becoming a celebrity. The odds of this happening are (infinity-1):1 against.

Re:Okay...

[spiralx]

It's more of a fundamental statement about the nature of horizons of any kind - whether that be the event horizon of a black hole, the horizon around an accelerating observer caused by the Unruh effect, or the horizon formed by the limit of the observable Universe. Any horizon implies that the information is constrained by the area of that horizon, and therefore whatever is inside the horizon must be specified by the exact same amount of information, which means things must be fuzzier than just plain quantum theory says.

Two overlapping horizons just makes one bigger horizon. And the holographic principle is talking about any arbitrary horizon at all - pick any volume of spacetime you want, the information inside is contrained by its boundary. There won't be any disagreement over what's going on on/within the boundary, its that the boundary determines how much information there is, not what's inside it.

Re:Okay...

[quarterbuck]

Thats the wrong article you are explaining. Here is what I understood
The "Holographic" article is the one which says that the world is really not a 3D space, but instead is a 3D projection of a 2 dimensional world . This holographic projection contains the same amount of information that is contained within the 2 dimensional "surface world". This means that any graininess in the 2 dimensional world is amplified in the 3D world - which is causing the Plancks length sized disruptions in the surface world to become observable sized (10^-16 m) graininess in our world. This graininess is causing an experiment to detect gravitational waves to pick up random noise since length of the measuring rulers (2 laser paths ) is fluctuating .
The theory developed from the idea that Black Holes have all their information codified in quantum waves on the surface - This surface is equivalent in information to the entire volume of the star contained within. When the Black hole vanishes, the waves on the surface carry the information with them and radiate out.

Re:Okay...

[Luyseyal]

I understand what you're saying. I haven't read the book you've recommended -- however, I thought the holographic principle meant that information on the horizon is by definition a duplicate of what's in the bulk. Therefore, two accelerated observers (quasar and Milky Way, e.g.) might disagree on certain aspects of the overlapping spacetime. I can see how if it's the whole universe, there's no disagreement. It's just the smaller ones I'm trying to understand.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the nature of information here.
-l

Re:Okay...

[haruchai]

I took a cursory look at the book some years ago and watched a lecture he gave on it several times.
Interesting stuff but, jeez, what a self-absorbed blowhard. To listen to him talk about the years he's spent thinking about this stuff, he gives you the impression that he invented all of this out of whole cloth.
In the lecture, he doesn't even mention Conway.
What an arrogant ( albeit intelligent) prick.

Re:Okay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Einstein said that gravity is a linear (not discrete) force. What that means is that while it might decrease over distance, the effect never truly becomes zero.

I think you meant 'continuous', in place of 'linear'.

It is often useful (and easier) to model aspects of our universe in a continuous fashion, even when we know this is an idealized case. When you look closely enough, aspects of our universe that we normally think of as continuous, such as matter, electricity, gravity, or time become discrete on the scale of the atom, the electron, the graviton, or the planck scale, etc.

What TFA itself is saying, is that the basic increment of distance in our universe might be analogous to a steep flight of stairs: from far above looking down, each stair appears small, but for someone walking on the stairway (ie. us) we also notice the vertical distance. And this larger increment of quantization may be observable with current technology.

Re:Okay...

[Ken_g6]

Which leads to the philosophical question...

If a gravity wave passes through a forest, and no detector can ever be sensitive enough to measure it, does it really exist?

Re:Okay...

[Anonymous Coward]

Information and entropy are related (as entropy is a measure of disorder), and entropy is related to temperature.

Be careful. Informational entropy and thermodynamic entropy are similar and interrelated, so your statement is accurate. However, taking your statement too far results in crazy pseudoscience like these two examples:

370.asp
thermodynamics

Re:Okay...

[spiralx]

The holographic principle is that there is no difference at all between the information stored on the boundary and the information inside the boundary - they are the same thing. Imagine a TV playing a film - it looks like there's a 3-D world obeying the laws we know, but it's just a 2-D screen - all of the information is in the screen, and the size of the screen limits the amount of information the 3-D world "inside" the screen can have.

And if you overlap boundaries... well, you've just got a bigger boundary, that's all. Black holes and so on are where the principle was developed, but it's about the fundamental limits to information processing in the Universe, which turn about to be proportional to surface area, not volume...

Re:Okay...

[Roger W Moore]

Einstein said that gravity is a linear (not discrete) force.

Actually Newton said that. Einstein said that it was actually a"fictious" force caused by masses bending space-time so that what we think of as a straight line is not actually a straight line. The effect is something similar to standing on the inside of a rotating space station. If you did this and threw a ball into the air it would appear to come back to your hand as if there were a force acting on it. However in reality it moved in a straight line and you followed the arc of a circle and came back to it. (Note: gravity works by bending space time: no rotation is required, but the principle is the same).

The claim here is far more than just gravity being discrete. They are saying that space-time itself is discrete at scales of 10^-16 m (compare this to a nucleus which has a radius of 10^-15 m). However we have probed scales far smaller that this, down to 10^-18 m if my back of envelope calculation is correct - but certainly lower that 10^-16 m. So I am very curious to see how they can explain that there have been no observable phenomena at accelerators given this extremely coarse (relatively speaking) quantum space-time sea.

Re:Okay...

[morgan_greywolf]

In fact, aren't Einstein's equations on gravity themselves nonlinear?

Re:Okay...

[Entropy98]

You'd think that would mean it would be easy to figure it all out. Instead pyhsics just gets less intuitive.
 
--
 
  Mafia RPG

Anti-science

[philspear]

Does this sound to anyone a little like the argument for intelligent design? "We can't explain why animals are the way they are because an intelligent creator that we don't understand has made them this way," to me sounds a lot like "We've gotten to the highest possible resolution of the nanoscale universe, because it's a hologram and that's it's highest resolution. It's okay that we can't see what we want to see, because it's not actually there."

I'm not a physicist so I might be missing the real testable hypothesis here, and I don't think the thought should be suppressed just because it's not scientific, but I think it's important to keep in mind that we're departing the realm of science here and moving towards a cop-out.

Re:Anti-science

[Rogerborg]

Does this sound to anyone a little like the argument for intelligent design?

Not even remotely, but thanks for asking. That's right neighbourly of you.

Re:Anti-science

[db32]

You need to read up more on the ideas surrounding a holographic universe. There are plenty of things on that that actually suggest that model as a reason for many of the phenomenon we observe. It isn't anti-science at all. Science generally advances quite a bit when "well, we can't see what we wanted to...we must have been wrong...we should try something else".

"Elements" are called elements because EARLY chemistry believed that all things were made up of a combination of elements in nature (earth, fire, water, etc). Of course over the years this was refined, and then refined again, and then once again refined some more. Atomic theory has come a LONG way from the expectation that all things were made out of the "elements of nature" through these constant refinements and NOT finding what we expected to find.

Re:Anti-science

[KDR_11k]

How's this related to ID? Sure, it predicts that the noise on a gravity detector is not preventable but that's a bit different to proclaiming there's a creator whose nature is unknowable. Note that it does not claim that the things in the distance are not there, at least not any more than the things right here.

Re:Anti-science

[MozeeToby]

The difference is that the people that follow this thoery were able to make a prediction (years ago in fact) that has been confirmed with modern testing equipment. Specifically, they predicted that things would become discrete at dimmensions much larger than the Planck Length. If the prediction hadn't panned out, they would have either revised the thoery or abandoned it all together.

Science: Testable, Falsifiable, Adapts to changing evidence.
ID: ...ummmm... We don't know, therefore 'God Did It'

Re:Anti-science

[Anonymous Coward]

Strangely, there is a bizarre Holographic-Universe theory by some crack-pot spiritualist. Someone gave me a book about it once, and it was plain nonsense.

Re:Anti-science

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, you've packed a lot of irony into that post. Here you are, taking something you know almost nothing about, and declaring it to be preposterous simply because it's outside your ordinary experience. "Cop-out"? What is a cop-out here is your mockery of skepticism.

I've tried to reword this to be less harsh, but I really can't justify cutting anything more. You've taken a perfectly reasonable (if somewhat unorthodox) model of the universe and dismissed it with a wave of the hand and a dash of incredulity. You have a brain; use it!

Re:Anti-science

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

> Does this sound to anyone a little like the argument for intelligent design?

No.

Take a look at one of the earlier papers on the holographic hypothesis here. It comes about, not because some physicist has simply thought "what happens if the universe is a giant hologram". It's implicit, in an incredibly surprising and beautiful way, in general relativity, a well tested physical model.

Hints can also been seen in a bunch of other independent physical results like the Bekenstein bound which point towards the 'granularity' of the 2D surface.

Nobody's copping out. People aren't even making up that much new stuff. They're working out the details of what's already contained within existing (and in some cases, well tested) physical theories.

It's probably worth remembering that for every press release made by a physics department there are probably years of work and thought by multiple physicists.

Re:Anti-science

[thedonger]

ID is brilliant. It is what the scientists already said, followed by "because God did it that way."

I often wonder if we aren't coming up with ever-stranger theories just so Einstein and Hawking continue to be right. OTOH, who cares. Regardless of whether or not I am a hologram the bank still wants my mortgage payment.

Re:Anti-science

[Tablizer]

The deeper we look the more layers we find. It's like finding out that your Commodore-64 is really an 8086-PC emulating the C64, but that the 8086 is really a 286 emulating the 8086. But the 286 is really a 386 emulating a 286, which is really a Pentium emulating a 386 emulating a 286 emulating a 8086 emulating a C64, and new evidence suggests that the Pentium is being emulated also.

God, knock it off already! It's not funny anymore.
     

Re:Anti-science

[philspear]

You know, you've packed a lot of irony into that post. Here you are, taking something you know almost nothing about, and declaring it to be preposterous simply because it's outside your ordinary experience.

You know, I did say quite explicitly I was not a physicist and could well be missing a testable hypothesis. I did not call it preposterous at all. Learn to read before you get offended at nothing.

Re:Anti-science

[mcgrew]

"Elements" are called elements because EARLY chemistry believed that all things were made up of a combination of elements in nature (earth, fire, water, etc).

Their four elements were earth, wind, fire, and water. I believe we simply misunderstand the ancients. The four "elements" weren't elements as we know them (hydrogen, helium, etc) but the four states of matter: solid, gaseous, plasma, and liquid.

Of course, they misunderstood the universe. But of course we do, too, although we misunderstand it less and less as time goes on.

Re:Anti-science

[philspear]

Well, to be honest I didn't understand any of that paper, but did get the sense that I was seriously misunderstanding what was being proposed, and jumped to conclusions. Thank you exp(pi*sqrt(163)) for helping me see the light.

I have to note that ID proponents spend years behind their "theories" and that doesn't make them any less ridiculous. Again though, I realize now that's comparing apples to oranges, ID is not scientific while holographic hypothesis appears to be.

Re:Anti-science

[spiralx]

"Elements" are called elements because EARLY chemistry believed that all things were made up of a combination of elements in nature (earth, fire, water, etc).

Their four elements were earth, wind, fire, and water. I believe we simply misunderstand the ancients. The four "elements" weren't elements as we know them (hydrogen, helium, etc) but the four states of matter: solid, gaseous, plasma, and liquid.

Of course, they misunderstood the universe. But of course we do, too, although we misunderstand it less and less as time goes on.

So what about Bose-Einsten condensates, supersolids, amorphous solids or the other poor states of matter then :P

Re:Anti-science

[LordKaT]

That would be one slow fucking computer.

Re:Anti-science

[Anonymous Coward]

I was operating under the assumption that the title ("Anti-science") and last sentence ("leaving the realm of science") meant exactly what they said. You may not have meant to be that certain about the matter, but that's what you actually said, and a side disclaimer isn't enough to soften statements clearly phrased as statements of fact.

Re:Anti-science

[dotancohen]

The deeper we look the more layers we find. It's like finding out that your Commodore-64 is really an 8086-PC emulating the C64, but that the 8086 is really a 286 emulating the 8086. But the 286 is really a 386 emulating a 286, which is really a Pentium emulating a 386 emulating a 286 emulating a 8086 emulating a C64, and new evidence suggests that the Pentium is being emulated also.

God, knock it off already! It's not funny anymore.

   

I think I missed the car analogy in there somewhere.

Re:Anti-science

[db32]

It really isn't a case of misunderstanding. Aristotle wrote quite a bit down on this Earth/Air/Fire/Water business of "Elements". The elements as we know them are called just retained that naming for sharing the definition of "what all things were made of". Aristotle wasn't really a scientist or chemist, but pretty much any Chemistry class I have ever taken started with a discussion of Aristotle and the elements as somewhat of a beginning of the thought that things are composed of more basic (elemental) things.

Re:Anti-science

[mcgrew]

Nobody knew about any of those states until late in the last century. I mean, come on, give the ancients a break!

Re:Anti-science

[ceoyoyo]

Do you have something against the 486?

Re:Anti-science

[atraintocry]

Asimov thought so too :D

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Re:Anti-science

[atraintocry]

I think you see ID as more forgiving than it really is. Many scientists (Ken Miller for example) believe in God, but that alone is not intelligent design.

ID was essentially a find/replace with Creationism in the relevant literature, following the Supreme Court's ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard that Creation science promoted a particular religion and could not be taught in public schools. Also mentions of a creator were replaced with things like "a blueprint" or "a plan".

The meat of the argument is the same, the idea of irreducible complexity, which Behe formalized in '92 or '93. His main examples, the blood clotting cascade, the eye, and the bacterial flagellum have been sufficiently explained via evolution to the satisfaction of the scientists, the courts, and basically everyone but Behe and the occasional school board.

Another main idea has to do with "gaps" in the fossil record.

To sum up, ID explicitly states that evolution cannot sufficiently explain the diversity and complexity of life that we witness. You seem to be saying that ID instead says that, while evolution is sufficient, God must have "designed" evolution. That sounds more like theistic evolution to me, which is interesting but more of a philosophical standpoint, where ID purports to be rooted in science.

Re:Anti-science

[BungaDunga]

He would, but he's being emulated on Steve Jobs' iPhone.

Re:Anti-science

[Tablizer]

I never had a 486. I jumped from a 386 into a Pentium.

Re:Anti-science

[yorkshiredale]

No, mine is certainly a Commodore-64. It's old, it's beige, and what is this 'Pentium' of which you speak?

Re:Anti-science

[dangitman]

And I thought that the C64 runs on magic smoke.

Re:Anti-science

[master_p]

...and finally the whole thing is just a Perl script running on God's calculator...

Computer, end program.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh bloody hell...

Holograms!

[vjmurphy]

This just in, Red Dwarf's Rimmer and Voyager's doctor upset, complain of "hologram of a hologram" prejudice.

Flatland!

[schneidafunk]

This story reminds me of an amazing book written in the late 1800's, "Flatland", which applies today more than ever.

Re:Flatland!

[mjbkinx]

Yes, a very nice, short read that you can order for cheap. The author is A. Square.

Re:Flatland!

[escay]

Indeed! while Flatland turns out to be more of a social commentary than a scientific one (as many good sci-fi books eventually mature into), the physical concept that Spaceland is merely a 3D projection of 2D information is very interesting.

This is not the first time noise in an experiment led to a groundbreaking discovery (if this indeed turns out to be one). Kudos to the scientists - often times the compulsive search for signal obscures the importance of noise.

Re:Flatland!

[Anonymous Coward]

And now: the amazing Karma-Whoring AC presents:

Edwin A. Abbot's _Flatland_ in audiobook form, thanks to the nice volunteers at Librivox.org.

Re:Flatland!

[Anonymous Coward]

read on google

http://books.google.com/books?id=HKackp-vG-YC&printsec=frontcover&dq=flatland&ei=Is1wSY-UEYqUkQTmkN3JBg#PPP1,M1

Re:Flatland!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or download:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/97

Re:Flatland!

[Enoxice]

Hey, daddio, just because he writes science fiction doesn't mean he's a square, ya dig?

Re:Flatland!

[city]

It was written by Edwin A. Abbot (that's E, A^2)

Re:Flatland!

[Anonymous Coward]

But you'd be better off looking under Edwin A. Abbott as the author if you're trying to find a copy. The Dover Thrift edition I have is only $2 (its was $1 when I got it years ago.) It's also available at Project Gutenberg.

Re:Flatland!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope yours was a joke but the author is actually Edwin Abbott.

Re:Flatland!

[Have Brain Will Rent]

A similar conjecture was described in a SciAm issue about (guessing) 2-3 years ago - that our observable 3D universe might actually be a 2D universe where our perception is creating a the illusion of a third dimension that doesn't really exist. But IIRC it required the universe to have negative curvature.

Re:Flatland!

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved that book! Had to read it for Calculus. I was special since I had Dual Enrollment Algebra the same semester. That class read Flatland also so as a reward (punishment?) for taking two math classes in the same semester the teacher had me read Sphereland for the second class. It was a sequel to Flatland written some years later by a different author. The Sphere that challenged the our hero from the first book was challenged himself by a fourth dimension.

Re:Flatland!

[spiralx]

Which is almost certainly does...

Re:Flatland!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/201

This version has illustrations (well, they're done in ASCII art, but yeah).

So, the source

[KDR_11k]

Is New Scientist a quality publication or one prone to sensationalism? I don't know much about the science news scene in the USA.

Re:So, the source

[poity]

NS is still high quality. Their illustrations and covers have gotten snazzier with time, but the intelligent articles are still there (the guest writers and ethics/philosophy perspectives are especially enjoyable), unlike Popular Mechanics/Science which are basically booklets of ads.

NS a British mag, though.

Re:So, the source

[syntaxglitch]

A bit of both. In my experience they have a tendency to sensationalize and inflate stuff that's mostly fringe or highly speculative. It's mostly a matter of tone and focus, though, they're still well rooted in actual science. If you want day-to-day news on solid scientific work, probably better off elsewhere. For coverage of interesting new ideas or possibilities in science, they're great. Just don't be disappointed if the ideas they cover don't end up working out.

Re:So, the source

[Anonymous Coward]

True. It's important to point out, it's not a science journal, but part of the popular press.

Re:So, the source

[mcgrew]

I don't know much about the science news scene in the USA.

IINM New Scientist is British.

Re:So, the source

[Hatta]

It's the best pop science magazine around. So it is high quality, but not an academic publication by any means.

Question is..

[Daswolfen]

Morpheus: I imagine that right now you're feeling a bit like Alice. Tumbling down the rabbit hole?
Neo: You could say that.
Morpheus: I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he's expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Why not?
Neo: 'Cause I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.
Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind -- driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Neo: The Matrix?
Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?
(Neo nods his head.)
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, or when go to church or when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. (long pause, sighs) Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
(In his left hand, Morpheus shows a blue pill.)
Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. (a red pill is shown in his other hand) You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Long pause; Neo begins to reach for the red pill) Remember -- all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.
(Neo takes the red pill and swallows it with a glass of water)

Do I take the red pill or blue?

Re:Question is..

[GayBliss]

"Take 4 red capsules, in 10 minutes, take 2 more... help is on the way."
-- from George Lucas's first film - THX 1138

Re:Question is..

[Chris Burke]

My pill was purple. WTF?

Re:Question is..

[mcgrew]

The red pill is a Barbiturate, the blue pill is LSD. No matter which one you take you're going to be FUUUUUUCKED UUUP!

And so...

[mcmonkey]

The small anti-counterfeiting patch on my MasterCard could be...

One tiny little universe.

Re:And so...

[drinkypoo]

If you cut it in half, do you get two half-assed universes? (I know it renders the card invalid, at least when you try to use it in person, or it should.)

Re:And so...

[Anonymous Coward]

So treat that card with respect. You scratch off that anti-counterfeiting patch and you're not just potentially committing fraud, you're also now guilty of mass genocide!

Think of the little people!

Re:And so...

[snspdaarf]

No, it's like a Mobius strip. You get one larger MasterCard.

Re:And so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I buy some pot off of you?

They found the Matrix?

[Wonko the Sane]

If the 3-dimensional universe is actually a 2-dimensional hologram, then maybe the whole thing is stored in RAM in some computer?

Re:They found the Matrix?

[schneidafunk]

I believe the 2D explanation was just an analogy and they are saying we live in a 5D world with a 4D exterior. FTA: "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."

Re:They found the Matrix?

[Niris]

Really we're just here to determine the question to the answer 42.

Re:They found the Matrix?

[4D6963]

Sure, if you leave out the fact that the "Matrix theories" are unfalsifiable, and therefore baseless.

Re:They found the Matrix?

[camperdave]

Sure, if you leave out the fact that the "Matrix theories" are unfalsifiable, and therefore baseless.

Baseless? My friend, it is you who are off base.

Science, for all its power, is limited. It can only comment on things that are testable, quantifiable, falsifiable. It cannot comment on things that are unmeasurable - not even to say that they do not exist. The most science can say is: there is no evidence to support the hypothesis. Science cannot measure courage, hope, beauty*, love, the soul, and a myriad of others. Do they exist? Who knows?

At one point science could not detect X-rays. It was an unfalsifiable theory in 1890. Did X-rays exist before then? Of course they did. Just because something is unmeasurable at a particular point in time does not mean that it is baseless.

Having said that, allow me to point out that if the universe has a resolution limit, then it is effectively "pixellated". One thing that produces pixellation effects is digitization. Therefore it is possible that the pixellation we observe in the universe is caused because it is digital in nature. Thus there is some measurable, falsifiable evidence that speaks to the "matrix theory".

*I am aware of the millihellen.

Re:They found the Matrix?

[KDR_11k]

I'm not sure the 5-4 thing was to say anything about the dimension count of the real universe, just a proof for specific numbers that may or may not be transferrable to other numbers of dimensions.

Re:They found the Matrix?

[orclevegam]

Having said that, allow me to point out that if the universe has a resolution limit, then it is effectively "pixellated". One thing that produces pixellation effects is digitization. Therefore it is possible that the pixellation we observe in the universe is caused because it is digital in nature.

Actually, anytime you record anything it becomes "pixelated", although sometimes other terms are used. The exception of course being when you know the actual formula and inputs used to generate the original in which case you can merely store the formula and inputs and then recreate the original at any point from that.

Take for instance a picture of something (for now assume we're using a traditional film camera and not a digital one). Generally we don't notice because our senses aren't that fine, but even a film camera will cause a certain amount of "pixelation" or to use the more accurate term, grain, to appear in both the negative and the final print. The quality of the image is dependent on how fine the crystal structure of the film used to take the picture is. There's nothing that makes digital information special in this regard, it's merely that the way more traditional analog information is stored and played tends to flatten out artifacts so that they're less noticeable in the reproduction.

As another example take sound recordings. No recording is ever a perfect 100% reproduction of the sounds at the point it was produced. That's not really a problem though, as we don't care about all the sounds, or even most of the sounds, so the lack of them in the final recording does not detract from its purpose. Further quite a bit of the sound we can't even perceive, so even if it was recorded we wouldn't know about it (its beyond the limits of our hearing).

Re:They found the Matrix?

[linzeal]

It is baseless in regards to the production of scientific theory. I agree with you that nebulous qualitative concepts in one era can and often do become definitive quantitative concepts in another era, but it is not scientific until you can incorporate it into a system of other theories. No scientific theory stands alone. These quantitative formulations stand and fall on the merit of their explanatory abilities and the ability to take such explanations and test them. No other system of knowledge is as robust or discriminatory and this leads me to believe that scientific knowledge is a special kind of knowledge that is superior to divine revelation or bullshit conjecture.

I am an engineer not a physicist, but how do you measure something at the plank length when you only have things at the plank length or greater in scale?

Re:They found the Matrix?

[spiralx]

Actually if there exists a wider multiverse than just our Universe, then it's much more likely we're in a simulated universe than a real one.

Have a read of The Goldilocks Enigma for discussion of multiverses, simulated universes, levitating super-turtles, God and what each hypothesis means and where it falls down... great book :)

Re:They found the Matrix?

[CaptainCarrot]

You mean "Planck length", which is a concept from physics, not "plank length", which is a concept from carpentry. (Or piracy. Whatever.)

Actually, the only person calling this a "theory" was GP. TFA was very careful not to. At this point it's only a hypothetical explanation for the observed noise, and there could be other causes. But it's useless to rule out hypotheses because they don't fit into any available theoretical framework, especially when, as in this case, none of them work particularly well.

Re:They found the Matrix?

[4D6963]

No that's balls. What is claimed to exist is either falsifiable or it's not, but it doesn't change. Your X-rays comparison is so flawed because it takes things backwards, i.e. claiming something to have been discovered before it has. If you claim "This kind of radiation may exist" you may give details as to why it should exist, like where it's coming from, or its characteristics. It's falsifiable in that, even if at the moment you're unable to validate or invalidate these claims, you could eventually say "no there's no such there, that's for sure, we tested".

The thing with "Matrix theories" is that they're inherently unfalsifiable, basically it's "we're all simulated in a computer and there's no way we could tell if it's true or not". Therefore that's baseless, because it doesn't make any claims about anything. That means you don't have any reason to even suggest these possibilities. I know people are confused with that falsifiability thing, but so are you. "Matrix theories" are just as valid as "big turtle theories", and actually if you compare them they're quite similar in that we project things that are familiar to us, such as computers or turtles, outside/as the basis of our universe. Saying when facing a scientifical question such as that resolution thing "maybe the Matrix simulation did it" is as moronic as saying "maybe God did it". Just another baseless belief. At least beliefs in deities have the merit to have a founding in what some psychiatrists call the collective inconcious, your "theory" only has a founding in a lack of education.

Science cannot measure courage, hope, beauty*, love, the soul, and a myriad of others. Do they exist? Who knows?

Huh yes you can. It's called an electroencephalogram, shows where your brain fires up when you experience these things. Not like it has anything to do with what we're talking about.

finite-resolution != hologram

[Ambiguous Coward]

I'm puzzled as to how one gets from "the universe may have a finite resolution" to "omfg it's prolly a hologram!!!"

That's a big whiskey-tango-foxtrot, over.

Re:finite-resolution != hologram

[rirugrat]

will i am agrees!

Re:finite-resolution != hologram

[Anonymous Coward]

What they are in fact proposing, is that the universe per se is actually a sphere surrounding us, very far in the distance. The things we see and interact with (and we ourselves) are projections into the 3D-space inside the sphere.

The reason they call it a hologram, is because hologram means "projection from 2D into a 3D image" - it need not be artificial.

The reason the volume would be blurry, is because the amount of information in the volume is the same as on the surface of the sphere. The surface is supposedly filled at Planck-density, necessitating a much lesser resolution in the volume, because the volume is of course bigger than the information-containing surface.

It's a little bit bizarre, I'll grant you that.

Re:finite-resolution != hologram

[aristotle-dude]

I'm puzzled as to how one gets from "the universe may have a finite resolution" to "omfg it's prolly a hologram!!!"

That's a big whiskey-tango-foxtrot, over.

Shhhh! The science fanboys might hear you. There is a lot of questionable science going on these days and I'm not just talking about studies sponsored by the tobacco industry.

This, along with Dark Matter, Dark Energy and String theory are typical untestable theories which scientists lately have been using to fill in holes in their own understanding of the nature of the universe. Rather than going back to the drawing board when a model does not work, they use a cop out like this one to fill in the blanks.

Re:finite-resolution != hologram

[samkass]

My understanding is that we all already knew the universe has a finite resolution-- The Planck length. What's been observed is that things don't just get smaller and smaller and smaller and BAM! they hit the limit. Instead, things get blurrier and blurrier and blurrier below a certain size-- starting at sizes much much bigger than a Planck length-- and that size corresponds well to what might have been predicted had the universe been structured like a hologram of a higher-dimensional construct being projected on a lower-dimensional one. And that that's one of several possible interpretations of the data that they're tracking down.

But I'm no physicist.

Re:finite-resolution != hologram

[sjames]

That is necessarily glossed over a bit in the article (and this post), but the gist is that it starts with a sort of what if. What IF the universe as we know it is a holographic projection of the interference patterns on the surface of the sphere that contains the universe. That would suggest that the 'resolution' of our universe would be coarser than the planck length (since the surface itself would have the resolution of a planck length). Then we have this big interferometer that seems to be seeing a fundamental coarsness of the universe that is indeed coarser than a planck length.

Since we have no other theories of why it would be that coarse, that makes the holographic theory the one possible explaination that we currently have.

In turn, that would invalidate every theory that cannot accommodate the observation.

Naturally, this makes the theorists very interested in experiments that do or do not replicate the observation.

Re:finite-resolution != hologram

[julesh]

I'm puzzled as to how one gets from "the universe may have a finite resolution" to "omfg it's prolly a hologram!!!"

Answer: you don't. You start with a theory that the universe is a hologram (there are sound reasons why this might be so, related to the theory that information is not destroyed on entry into a singularity and the theory that the universe is itself a singularity within, essentially, a larger universe), and then from that you make predictions about the resolution of the universe. When noise turns up at a similar resolution in an experiment, you can see this as confirmation of the preexisting theory.

IANAQP. I just read stuff like this and vaguely understand.

Re:finite-resolution != hologram

[julesh]

This, along with Dark Matter, Dark Energy and String theory are typical untestable theories which scientists lately have been using to fill in holes in their own understanding of the nature of the universe. Rather than going back to the drawing board when a model does not work, they use a cop out like this one to fill in the blanks.

Actually, this theory was a predicted consequence of a combination of information theory, relativity and quantum theory before there was any evidence for it. This is not a "model didn't work, so let's invent something to account for it" scenario: this is a "model predicted something and it looks like we might have found it" scenario.

Re:finite-resolution != hologram

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not 'The universe may have a finite resolution' (quantum theory has said that for around 100 years now), but that the resolution is so large. Quantum theory predicts a resolution several orders of magnitude smaller.

What they are saying is that the unexpectedly large resolution is because this universe is a 'hologram' of sorts, and that the edge that the hologram is on has the resolution predicted by quantum theory. Therefore our universe (which is larger than it's holographic source) has a resolution that is larger, because there can't be more data in our universe than is on the holographic source.

Ortz

[Anonymous Coward]

Did the Ortz write that summary?

"Here is *bright* and *smooth*. Other place is **Frumple**."

So...

[chemindefer]

Ceci n'est pas une pipe?

Don't panic

[goombah99]

I hear Nvidia is updating the universes GPU and soon we will get less grains. Mac Users will be able to switch between GPU, one with faster performance and shorter lifespan and one grainier but longer lasting.

it is interesting to note that the universe is mainly built out of second order laws. This means that in many cases there are a small number of poles or zeros that can control macroscopic behaviour and often analytic solutions exist. This would be how a desiginer would do it. given a choice one chooses a qaudradic over a 6th order polynomial since an anytic solution to the zeros exits.

Likewise when things in a game are not observed you don't keep maintaining them. You just recreate them when needed. That is you keep the wireframe but don't texturize it till it is on screen. This is analgous to the way in QM the details are not predictcable till you look, and when you do the details of other things not simultaneously observed can change at a distance.

simmilarly in optics resolution behaves the way it does in video games. pixelation means that the farther something is away the less resolved it appears. There is constant angular resoltuion not spatial.

Re:Don't panic

[KDR_11k]

Careful, you mention a designer, it's still not a given that there is one even if the universe is a computer.

Re:Don't panic

[digitalsolo]

Well if we're in a game, I, for one, would like a refund.

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

it is interesting to note that the universe is mainly built out of second order laws. This means that in many cases there are a small number of poles or zeros that can control macroscopic behaviour and often analytic solutions exist. This would be how a desiginer would do it. given a choice one chooses a qaudradic over a 6th order polynomial since an anytic solution to the zeros exits.

To say that certain aspects of the universe can be modeled using elegant mathematics, and that this implies a designer is a non sequitor. If I was God, I would have used 6th order equations, all the way down, just to show how awesome at math I was.

Re:Don't panic

[Nebu]

This is analgous to the way in QM the details are not predictcable till you look, and when you do the details of other things not simultaneously observed can change at a distance.

See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/collapse-postul.html

Back when people didn't know about macroscopic decoherence aka many-worlds - before it occurred to anyone that the laws deduced with such precision for microscopic physics, might apply universally at all levels - what did people think was going on?

The initial reasoning seems to have gone something like:

"When my calculations showed an amplitude of -1/3i for this photon to get absorbed, my experimental statistics showed that the photon was absorbed around 107 times out of 1000, which is a good fit to 1/9, the square of the modulus."

to

"The amplitude is the probability (by way of the squared modulus)."

to

"Once you measure something and know it didn't happen, its probability goes to zero."

Read literally, this implies that knowledge itself - or even conscious awareness - causes the collapse. Which was in fact the form of the theory put forth by Werner Heisenberg!

[...]

If collapse actually worked the way its adherents say it does, it would be:

1. The only non-linear evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
2. The only non-unitary evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
3. The only non-differentiable (in fact, discontinuous) phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics.
4. The only phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics that is non-local in the configuration space.
5. The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates CPT symmetry.
6. The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates Liouville's Theorem (has a many-to-one mapping from initial conditions to outcomes).
7. The only phenomenon in all of physics that is acausal / non-deterministic / inherently random.
8. The only phenomenon in all of physics that is non-local in spacetime and propagates an influence faster than light.

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't butcher quantum mechanics like that. It's not like there are details which are left unfixed; it's that certain notions are incompatible with each other.

For instance, it's not like a particle might have some particular momentum and velocity, but somehow the universe is just being lazy about deciding their values. Rather, the notion of having a definite momentum and definite position is contradictory.

QM is much weirder than you think.

Re:Don't panic

[disputationist]

it is interesting to note that the universe is mainly built out of second order laws. This means that in many cases there are a small number of poles or zeros that can control macroscopic behaviour and often analytic solutions exist. This would be how a designer would do it.

Nope. It is just that scientists use simple models like harmonic oscillator for most systems, simply because they are easy to solve. That doesn't mean that the universe is 'built' from second order laws. The rest of your post is also similar misinterpretations of QM, optics etc

Re:Don't panic

[KDR_11k]

"obverving" in quantum mechanics means interaction with larger objects, not conscious observation. Schrödinger's cat would not go into a superposition because it is too large.

Re:Don't panic

[Hurricane78]

Exactly. The intelligent designer concept is only working if you can't think 'til the next step:

1 Where is that designer?
2 What is he in?
3 Who created the designer?
4 Who created, whatever the designer is in?
5 GOTO 1

Re:Don't panic

[Hurricane78]

I would have used Xth order equations, where X is defined as

X = X+1th order equation

all the way down. just to show how awesome I am in everything and all!

Re:Don't panic

[19thNervousBreakdown]

One bullet is all it takes.

Re:Don't panic

[pizzach]

If I was God, I would have used Xth order equations, where X is defined as

X = XXX order equation

, all the way down, just to show how much of a demented pervert I was.

There, fixed that for you. You could call it the best combination of the two parent posts.

Re:Don't panic

[digitalsolo]

I said I wanted a refund, I didn't say I was done playing.

Re:Don't panic

[goombah99]

Exactly. The intelligent designer concept is only working if you can't think 'til the next step:

1 Where is that designer?
2 What is he in?
3 Who created the designer?
4 Who created, whatever the designer is in?
5 GOTO 1

Well yes. But even in your scheme, each step has a designer that creates the next layer.

The problem you assert is that it seems like an endless loop since we usually have no more evidence at any step of the loop to assert that this is the last step. But the whole point of the original post was the reverse. It was to assert that at least from what we can measure at this layer, it is very suggestive that we are not the top layer. So there needs to be atleast one more layer where our world's esigner lives.

Was that layer designed to? Can't say since I have no observations of what it is like.

Is design implausible? no necessarily. We do live in a finite universe. We have more than enough computing on the planet to simmulate multiple synaptic cortexes and the level of neural activation. And if you did the simmulation slower than real time you could simmulate many many of these. That's just with the feeble computation we have.

Now imagine that we are embedded in not simply a larger world but a world that is for example 4 dimensional. There's plenty of matter around there to simmulate 3 d worlds just as we have planty of matter with which to simmilate 2d worlds.

SO it's not inconceivable there could be a higher level. and given that what we can measure has the earmarks of design, it makes it even more plausible.

but it says notghing about how many simmulations deep we might be.

Re:Don't panic

[mcgrew]

Of course there isn't. Neo blew up the archetect and his building!

Re:Don't panic

[hierophanta]

really!? the paradox of that statement is fascinating.

Re:Don't panic

[steelfood]

Agreed. Why are large celestial bodies spherical? It is the most efficient configuration with the least complexity. The same applies to the universe. The most efficient configuration for the least complexity wins.

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't want to make it beautiful?

Re:Don't panic

[dotancohen]

If I was God, I would have used 6th order equations, all the way down, just to show how awesome at math I was.

What's wrong with the turtles?

Re:Don't panic

[tenco]

it is interesting to note that the universe is mainly built out of second order laws. This means that in many cases there are a small number of poles or zeros that can control macroscopic behaviour and often analytic solutions exist. This would be how a desiginer would do it. given a choice one chooses a qaudradic over a 6th order polynomial since an anytic solution to the zeros exits.

ITYM "it is interesting to note that mathematical models of the universe are mainly second order laws." And these easily break down if you look at more complex systems like nonlinear optic materials. Then you have to use solutions which are not analytical or use approximations. E.g. to my knowledge there are no exact analytical solutions for atoms and molecules except the nonrelativistic mathematical model of hydrogen. IIRC even the electric field itself strays from a second order law if the field strength is high enough (inside atoms).

Re:Don't panic

[JebusIsLord]

explain please how an entity can design itself. Just because what you typed reads like valid english, doesn't make it a profound truth. In your case, you're just blabbering nonsense.

Re:Don't panic

[AndersOSU]

not so fast

Large celestial bodies are only spherical to a first order approximation. Just like cosmic background radiation is uniform, atoms are inert, and space is empty.

For most things the first order approximations are enough, but the more we refine our models the more neat things we can do.

Re:Don't panic

[Raenex]

It's funny to Science re-discover what we knew 12,000 years ago :)

I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Don't panic

[beckerist]

seconded

Re:Don't panic

[modmans2ndcoming]

Looks like someone forgot to read up on the latest QM measuring techniques.

Using Weak measurement, we can not measure events with out changing them, we can even measure events that occurred in the past.

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish.

What it does show, I think - and I'm really going out on a limb here - is that our universe is fundamentally mathematical.

For example - ever wondered what quarks are made of? Or, rather, what they actually ARE if you look beyond their charge, colour charge etc. and the way they interact (as described by the various theories like QED and QCD)? What ARE they, truly and fundamentally?

I think the idea that the universe we live in is fundamentally mathematical - that it isn't just described well in terms of certain mathematical objects but IS a mathematical object in itself - is intriguing. At the very least, it'd explain why mathematics work so well in physics and other natural sciences.

Re:Don't panic

[wdef]

Some things can be solved analytically exactly from second order equations, and some cannot, depending on the theory used to represent the system.A wonderful example iirc is the spinning top. In classical mechanics, the top cannot be solved exactly. Someone (Felix Klein? or was it Lagrange?) wrote a whole book on it. But in general relativity, the top can be solved exactly in about one page.What we have is that classical mechanics is a particular approximation of general relativity, at one end of the scale, and of quantum mechanics, at the other. We don't have one theory that fits the behavior of everything. We have a set of theories that work in particular circumstances.The designer, then, still has the last laugh, until there is a TOE, if there ever is.

Re:Don't panic

[HJED]

I think that should be X = x^3

Re:Don't panic

[disputationist]

What we have is that classical mechanics is a particular approximation of general relativity, at one end of the scale, and of quantum mechanics, at the other.

Not quite, they describe different things, so you can put them on the same scale. Classical mechanics is a framework for describing the dynamics of a system once you specify the forces. QM is a different framework. But GR is a theory for describing a particular force, gravity.

A wonderful example iirc is the spinning top. In classical mechanics, the top cannot be solved exactly. But in general relativity, the top can be solved exactly in about one page

This doesn't make any sense IMO, unless you can come up with something to back it up. If you mean the precession of a top in the presence of gravity, then sure it can be solved analytically in classical mechanics, but the general two body problem has no analytical solution in GR, and I doubt the restriction to a top simplifies it enough to allow a closed form solution. But I can give you valid examples that suggest the opposite. In classical mechanics, the dynamics under a linear potential (constant force) is very simple: constant acceleration in one direction. But try solving that in quantum mechanics, and what you get are hideous Airy functions to describe the position of the particle.

The designer, then, still has the last laugh, until there is a TOE, if there ever is.

Not even then. I don't know what it means among laypeople, but for a physicist TOE means a quantum field theory that describes gravity, electroweak and strong force. I can guarantee that we will have such a theory in 100 years, and probably a lot less. I can also guarantee that this TOE will eventually be superseded by a more accurate theory.

Re:Don't panic

[naoursla]

It might go into superposition from our perspective if no information escaped from the box.

Maybe each holographic cell is actually is actually a distribution of cells across a 5th dimension. When information is transferred from one cell to the next, it changes the distribution of both cells in a way that conditionally links the different possibilities. When you observe something you are linking the cells in which you exist to the cells you are observing (and your brain records it which helps to preserve that link.

But if you can isolate a set of cells so that they don't interact with you then maybe those cells can form a large superposition bubble. When you observe it, you get linked to one of a billion states at random. If all of the billions of states are divided into two very similar and distinct categories then that bubble 'collapses' into one of them from your point of view.

That isn't very useful from a dead cat perspective, but it might be useful for computation.

Re:Don't panic

[Hal_Porter]

Maybe the universe runs on the programmable calculator God plays with when he should be listening to math lectures.

Re:Don't panic

[Hal_Porter]

Please don't butcher quantum mechanics like that. It's not like there are details which are left unfixed; it's that certain notions are incompatible with each other.

For instance, it's not like a particle might have some particular momentum and velocity, but somehow the universe is just being lazy about deciding their values. Rather, the notion of having a definite momentum and definite position is contradictory.

QM is much weirder than you think.

I'm not sure the uncertainty principle is that weird. Consider, I have an atom in a box. If I want to find its location I need to fire short wavelength photons at at it to get a high res image. Short wavelength photons have high energy so they wack the atom around, i.e change its velocity. Or I could use long wavelength photons. Low res image but I don't change the atom's velocity by much.

It's like some physicist said to me about Shrödingers cat. "If two people open the box, does that mean the wave function collapses twice. The wavefunction collapse is about knowledge, not about reality".

So it's not necessarily that reality is fuzzy and indistinct, more that our knowledge of it is limited.

Re:Don't panic

[evilviper]

3 Who created the designer?

Evolution.

Re:Don't panic

[Hurricane78]

No. The point is, that the only reason we add an imaginary non-provable layer (the designer) to our theories is, to explain where it all came from. Or in other words: The last layer. The end. Where nothing is outside.

Religious people think that, when they say "god did it all", this problem would be solved.
But they then disallow the question where god came from, because this would crash their whole schizophrenic dream world.

In reality the question where everything came from can't be answered. (At least for a Human brain and for a looong time.)
It's like the question what was before time. You can't answer that, because the term "before" is defined as something inside a time line.

That's all. You can spare me the whole explanation of thinking about layers we can't say anything about.

Re:Don't panic

[BiggerIsBetter]

What's wrong with the turtles?

Turtles can't do algebra.

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure the uncertainty principle is that weird.

Oh it is. Until you understand what is going on, of course. Though there is nothing "fuzzy and indistinct" about reality, a particle can't have definite momentum and position. It's a not that we can't figure it out, or somehow our measuring it always destroys it. This idea from classical physics simply doesn't transfer.

Here's a bad example that kind of illustrates the point:
Suppose you have a purple shirt. You ask the question "is the shirt pure blue, or does it have no blue in it?" The answer is neither: there is some blue, but it isn't pure blue.

The idea of a particle having definite momentum requires it to have different positions in the same way that being purple requires both blue and non blue colors.

So it's not necessarily that reality is fuzzy and indistinct, more that our knowledge of it is limited.

You're forgiven for saying this: it's the same thing Einstein believed. Check out the EPR paradox. The issue is not a question of limiting our knowledge. QM is much weirder than you think.

Re:Don't panic

[Boronx]

So it's not necessarily that reality is fuzzy and indistinct, more that our knowledge of it is limited.

This is a popular and comforting notion that has long been dis-proved by empirical evidence: the double slit experiment is the classic example that shows that a particle is fuzzy, it's not just our knowledge of it. Heck, this even the point of the cat in a box. Schroedinger didn't say that the cat's state was indeterminable, he said it was in an indeterminate state.

Re:Don't panic

[Genda]

Actually the strongest suggestion for a "Designed" universe is the amazing degree to which the universal constants allow for the existence of intelligent life. Change any of them the tiniest fraction of a percent, and we couldn't have happened. The flip side is that in a multiverse, with infinite universes, we'd have to exist in those universes where we are possible, and that as relatively rare as that might be, there are still an infinite number of universes inhabited by intelligent life.

Kind of makes you wonder if we all live in some infinitely advance High School students science fair project.

Re:Don't panic

[dotancohen]

What's wrong with the turtles?

Turtles can't do algebra.

But they can do geometry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics

Re:Don't panic

[dkf]

What's wrong with the turtles?

Turtles can't do algebra.

But they can do geometry:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics

OK, I'm confused. Can turtles do Algebraic Geometry?

Re:Don't panic

[dylan_-]

No. The point is, that the only reason we add an imaginary non-provable layer (the designer) to our theories is, to explain where it all came from. Or in other words: The last layer. The end. Where nothing is outside.

But that isn't what your argument says. You claim states that if there is a need for a creator then surely there is also a need for the creator to have a creator.

Now consider, if I programmed a virtual reality that had virtual creatures capable of considering their own existence and speculating whether they had a creator or not. One of my virtual people makes the same argument as you: if I created them, then who created me? That puts this argument in the following position; either:

1. I created them, God created me, meta-God created God, meta-meta-God created meta-God...etc
2. I do not exist!
3. It is impossible for me (or anyone in the future) to ever create virtual beings who are capable of intelligent discourse.

I suppose you might consider option 3 as relatively plausible, but I can't think of any good reason to limit technology in such a way; can you? I suspect your argument is faulty somehow.

Re:Don't panic

[Anonymous Coward]

i.e.,a Turtle, of course....!!!

Re:Don't panic

[Eli Gottlieb]

No, only the tortoises who are the Great God Om can do geometry.

Re:Don't panic

[UnknownSoldier]

You're confusing the physical universe with the spiritual creator. This universe, along all the others, is an extension of God, as are all things. There is nothing BUT the All-Parent, by definition. Or to put it another way, God / All-Parent / All-That-Is is experiencing itself as it grows. An entity "designs" itself the same way that you choose who you become as you mature from a child to an adult.

If it seems non-sense it is because there is no good way to communicate it without a valid frame of reference -- unfortunately the best way is the one you will learn after you die, and then you will truly understand why "Mind, not Space, is the true Final Frontier."

If you wish to learn the truth about reality while still human, I would highly recommend Robert Monroe's (Hemi-Sync) "The Gateway Experience" as he approaches reality from the most scientific approach -- using your personal experiments as verification. Thomas Campbell also has interesting conclusions at http://www.my-big-toe.com/ .

--
"If you have never been dead, you know nothing about life."

Re:Don't panic

[UnknownSoldier]

Ask the geologists how old the Sphinx is...

Or maybe both...

[solder_fox]

> "We think it's at least a year too early to get excited,"

This man has either wonderful or terrible parties.

"A Year Too Early?"

[aquatone282]

Screw that! I'm getting drunk NOW!

Woohoo!

Perhaps the ancients had it right ...

[GillBates0]

The Universe as an illusion in Hindu philosophy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(illusion) .

I, for one, welcome our new Matrix overlords, and will be on the holodeck if you need me.

Re:Perhaps the ancients had it right ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Pretty much every bit of physics news inevitably seems to attract mystics. Look, the ancient Hindu philosophers weren't scientists. Neither were the ancient Greek philosophers, or the ancient Chinese philosophers, or the ancient Hebrew philosophers, or ... None of them was observing the universe around them in any systematic way. They were pretty much all sitting around staring at the insides of their own skulls. Any ideas they had that superfically appear to foreshadow some development in modern science were a matter of blind luck.

Re:Perhaps the ancients had it right ...

[Nick Ives]

Physics is pretty mystical though. Don't you find it incredible that, from the initial energy of the big bang, there now exists self replicating, self aware patterns of matter?

Re:Perhaps the ancients had it right ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah! I doubt you go outside.

Re:Perhaps the ancients had it right ...

[KDR_11k]

Hologram does not mean illusion although Star Trek may have brought that association to the masses, it means a projection of a surface that appears to have more dimensions. While it appears different from what it is it does still exist. It just means we don't perceive it in the way it actually works.

Re:Perhaps the ancients had it right ...

[Anonymous Coward]

No. By definition, I would have to disbelieve it to find it incredible. And I do believe that there now exist self replicating self-aware patters of matter.

Re:Perhaps the ancients had it right ...

[atraintocry]

My main belief is that the universe has beauty, and that humans are able to discover and appreciate it. I wouldn't use the word "mystical" but perhaps "beautiful" and I would say that physics encompasses these things because of its subject matter. Like a painting of a beautiful woman :D

This reminds me of a book...

[xt]

There is a book called The Holographic Universe and it is quite well-written and interesting.

You can also read more here and at Wikipedia.

Modern physics is full of mind-blowing theories... Interesting times indeed!

Re:This reminds me of a book...

[drinkypoo]

There is a book called The Holographic Universe and it is quite well-written and interesting.

I've read the book, and I did indeed find it captivating. I have not read TFA (yet?) but from the summary this does not actually sound like it is necessarily evidence for a holographic universe. It would at least be equally good evidence (and occam's razor doesn't really apply when we have too little data to make a good assessment, does it?) that we are all living in a computer simulation which operates at a fixed clock rate.

Among the many things I am not, I am not a physicist, but it seems to me that if there is a given speed at which certain effects propagate then perhaps it is possible to take advantage of the speed of propagation just by making big spinning arrays of magnets or something. As hilarious as I find it to be typing that... I guess I still don't understand time cube :( But seriously, if there is a rate at which gravity propagates it might be possible to take advantage of that effect to create diffraction patterns which nullify or enhance its effects. And if we actually discover a quantum unit of time it will likely end up telling us some really amazing things. Which I can't possibly imagine, but I do know a top-flight physicist that I can go have set me straight if needed.

Re:This reminds me of a book...

[Anonymous Coward]

I read that book a decade ago, and it blew my mind. That the first step towards proving some of its theories has now been taken is really exciting. Maybe sometime in my statistically remaining 45-odd years we'll actually get to see some real results out of this.

Re:This reminds me of a book...

[julesh]

And John G. Cramer has an article here (and in the December issue of Analog, if anyone has that and hasn't read it yet). This is a very cool theory, indeed, and I'm glad to see it getting more mainstream attention.

Re:This reminds me of a book...

[FiloEleven]

Hooray! I was hoping to find some reference to that book or either of the theories it is built upon: David Bohm's Holographic Universe theory, based on his reflections on quantum mechanics, essentially stating (IIRC and highly simplified) that a non-local hidden variable must exist and following that to a conclusion that space, time, matter, the entire universe is an unbroken whole that we conscious beings artificially divide; and Karl Pribam's Holonomic Brain Model, stating (IIRC and highly simplified) that our consciousness arises from the interference patterns created by brainwaves, and that the idea of functions of consciousness being tied to certain areas of the brain (language, memory, etc.) is faulty.

On Pribam's side there are some interesting experiments that include removing the brains of salamanders and putting them back in backwards, upside down, even sliced'n'diced, only to have the salamander act normally when brought back from sedation. The Holographic Universe is the best book I have come across for information on Pribam's development of the model, and the section that details his findings is indeed captivating as drinkypoo wrote.

The Holographic Universe is definitely an interesting book though it tends toward the mystical (ESP, auras, time travel, etc.) the further you read. I myself am somewhat inclined in that direction, or at least keep an open mind, but I believe the average Slashdotter will dismiss the whole thing out of hand. For those of you who are interested in Bohm's theory more than Pribam's (or like to impale your brains on advanced physics), I'd recommend David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order. This book has none of the mystical implications of the Talbot book and lays out Bohm's theory much more fully, if you can understand it (I certainly couldn't once he started using the symbols presumably known to QM wizards). It is rather uneven, being very dry in some parts and very math-heavy in others, so watch out. I would personally prefer a book written for a more general audience, but his theory has been ignored for 50 years. Maybe I'll get my wish if the experiments in the article continue to point in his direction.

Re:This reminds me of a book...

[KDR_11k]

I'd be careful, that book summary mentions supernatural stuff. Talbot is apparently known for trying to find paranormal phenomena in science. I don't think that's the same theory that this experiment went towards.

Re:This reminds me of a book...

[KDR_11k]

Appending that since I finally found the right articles, the book is about the holographic paradigm which counts as quantum mysticism while the experiment is about the holographic principle which is a part of quantum gravity theories.

Re:This reminds me of a book...

[mcgrew]

Modern physics is full of mind-blowing theories... Interesting times indeed!

There is an ancient Chinese curse that goes "may you live in interesting times."

Re:This reminds me of a book...

[atraintocry]

Well, I'll provide some counterpoint here...I read the book and I thought it was a bunch of nonsense.

Talbot takes what I consider to be a mostly legitimate interpretation of QM (Bohm's) and uses it as the basis for "proof" of things like ESP, faith healing, etc.

Re:This reminds me of a book...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. The Holographic Universe is all about finding explanations for the paranormal. It's about as scientific as "What the Bleep Do We Know?" (that is, not scientific at all), but at least it doesn't talk about Ramtha (35,000 year old warrior spirit and anagram for Martha).

getting grainier?

[jmp0xfce2]

IANAP but if I understand TFA correctly, then they propose that the possibly detected graininess of reality is the result of the ratio between the surface area of our lightcone (the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe) to it's volume. Does this mean that we are getting grainier over time, since the radius of our lightcone increases with lightspeed?

Re:getting grainier?

[julesh]

IANAP but if I understand TFA correctly, then they propose that the possibly detected graininess of reality is the result of the ratio between the surface area of our lightcone (the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe) to it's volume. Does this mean that we are getting grainier over time, since the radius of our lightcone increases with lightspeed?

No, it's not about our lightcone, but about the boundary of the visible universe (i.e., that area of the universe which expansion is causing to move away from us so quickly that light from here will reach it but never get beyond it). As peculiar as it seems, parts of the universe are moving away from us faster than the speed of light (at least from our perspective).

IANAP either, in case you couldn't guess. :)

By Neruo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gravity is a force subject to the laws of the universe (as yet not understood by humans). Gravity has no mass, but works based on mass. Gravity can be zero, but only when all mass is zero, even on the atomic/subatomic level. This is called void and in void there is no gravity.

Bonuse Time!

I RTFA, and as I can tell, this really isn't anything new. The universe is no different here then it is 100000000000 light years from here in any of the 3D directions you take.

Okay.

[morgan_greywolf]

So, um, how does this translate into the universe being a hologram? Maybe it's just me, but it seems that just because the universe may be all discrete doesn't mean it's a hologram.

Re:Okay.

[qbwiz]

Many theories posit that the universe is grainy, but the graininess there is so small that we can't measure it. The holographic universe theory has, as a possible consequence, that the graininess is much larger than otherwise, so that it can be (and has been) measured by experiment.

Re:Okay.

[KDR_11k]

The jitter is much larger than the Planck length (which should be the quantization distance). However it matches the quantization resolution that would be expected from a universe that is actually a hologram that is encoded in its border. That's because the border would then obey the Planck length and its quantization would result in a much "blurrier" resolution at the point we are projected to. Another point is that black holes have some sort of holographic encoding of the information inside on their event horizon.

Re:Okay.

[morgan_greywolf]

But you still didn't answer my question. If we suppose the universe is all discrete and therefore 'grainy', the size of the grains seems rather irrelevant as to whether those grains are constituents of a hologram.

Sand is grainy. We can measure the graininess of sand. But sand isn't a hologram. See what I'm saying?

Re:Okay.

[zmooc]

The grainyness doesn't translate directly into the universe being a hologram; it's the other way around. The hologram principle predicts a certain grain-size (bigger grains than predicted by other theories) and that seems to correspond quite nicely to the noise detected by the GEO600.

More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

Re:Okay.

[spiralx]

A hologram is a 2-D surface that gives rise to a 3-D image. The holographic principle is that the interior of a 3-D horizon is completely specified by the information encoding on its 2-D boundary i.e. a 2-D surface giving rise to a 3-D volume...

So the interior can only be described in as much detail as the 2-D surface can store, which works out to mean things can only be specified down to a much larger scale than the Planck length.

Funny...

[oskay]

I've never seen the word "Pringle" (singular) used before. And yet, we all know exactly what it means. Speaking of which, I could really go for a Twik now.

OMG it finally makes sense now!

[Jabbrwokk]

You are definitely on to something:

That is *funny*. You think you *see* Orz but Orz are not *light reflections*. Maybe you think Orz are *many bubbles* too. It is such a joke. Orz are not *many bubbles* like *campers*. Orz are just Orz. I am Orz. I am one with many *fingers*. My *fingers* reach through into *heavy space* and you *see* *Orz bubbles*

In light of the article's suggestions, the Orz suddenly make a lot more sense. And I am going to reinstall that game and play it for the umpteenth time.

Just remember what happened to the Androsynth.

"theory of the week"

[peter303]

I'd say no confidence at all considering how often they change theories.

definitely not

[jweller13]

Definitely not. "intellegent design" is a religion not science.

What would Schrödinger say?

[Applepuppy]

Physics involving cats is bad enough, but now the all cats are holograms..?

Re:What would Schrödinger say?

[mcgrew]

Physics involving cats is bad enough, but now the all cats are holograms..?

If you look inside Schrödinger's Fridge there may or may not be a beer.

Maybe the cat drank them.

Black holes

[barakn]

This theory was stimulated by research suggesting the information about a collapsed star is stored in quantum fluctuations of the black hole's horizon. However, when applied to the universe as a whole, to quote the NewScientist article: "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." I had some questions resulting from my own dim understanding of black holes and having read only the NewScientist article, not the published paper.

Matter that falls into a black hole, from the perspective of a faraway observer at rest w/ respect to the black hole, appears to slow down and the light reflected becomes redshifted - the object appears to be almost frozen in time just before the redshifting becomes so great that the object becomes invisible. The object never appears to actually go in but is stuck forever at the event horizon. This suggests to me that information about infalling matter is also stored in the black hole's horizon. So what I'd like to know - is the surface area of all the black holes within the visible universe included in their calculations along with the surface area of the visible universe? If not, are even black holes simply holograms of the visible universe's surface area, thus making the information encoded in the black hole horizons redundant? Would including the black hole surface area significantly change the expected frequency of the holographic noise?

Re:Black holes

[Hertzman]

I recommend you reading this book of Lee Smolin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Roads_to_Quantum_Gravity

Re:Black holes

[fermion]

There are a couple really interesting things here. As mentioned, the assumption is that information is lost to the black hole, then hawking radiation, in which pairs of virtual particles form at the edge of a black hole, and then sometimes one of the pair manages to escape slowly facilitates the evaporation of the black hole. This of course assumes that evaporation rate by the virtual particles is greater than the rate of incoming matter, something that might be true when the universe becomes very large and black holes contain a large percentage of, for example, fermions. Under these condition, since information cannot be destroyed, the surface of a black hold must encode the information, and then release the information back to the universe through this hawkings radiation.

So the answer to the frequency question might be this. Because the information contained on a closed surface must be the same as the information contained in side a closed surface must be the same, this implies that the size of the fundamental unit inside the surface must vary, assuming that we are assuming the plank length to the fundamental unit on the surface. Assume, for instance, that our closed surface is a sphere. Assume further that the radius of the that sphere is r plank length units long. That means that the surface area of the sphere is 4 pi r^2 and the area is 4/3 pi r^3. This means that each square planck unit of the surface encodes r/3 units of volume. If we assume this volume is a cube, then the length of fundamental cube encoded in the closed surface in the a square of plank length the cube root of r, where r is the radius of closed surface, or so it seems.

To me this seems kind of neat because it show that information is compressed in a black hole, as the radius of the black is smaller than the radius of the universe. It also shows that as the universe expands, the amount of information held in a cube also is reduced, but at a much smaller rate. This would imply that the frequency would change in a black hole, and also over time as the universe expanded. This side length must have grown very rapidly in the early universe, and now must be a very small change, which would only be observed when matter is compressed to a black hole.

However, if the universe continues to expand indefinitely, the size fo the smallest volumes outside fo the black hole will be huge compared to those inside of the black hole.

Re:Black holes

[wurp]

I don't get your point about information being stored in the black hole's horizon. What do you mean, the information is stored? The object is there, near-ish to the horizon...

And two other points about black holes. Firstly, the object doesn't "appear" to get stuck at the event horizon. From the POV of an outside observer, the object *in fact* never falls into the black hole. Part of Special Relativity is that what you see about the objects subject to relativistic effects is representative of what you'll measure about the object in any way, and hence is in every meaningful way representative of reality. The same is true of General Relativistic effects.

Secondly, objects falling towards the horizon are (usually) eventually going to fall into the hole from the POV of an outside observer, because the hole's horizon will expand as more matter gets densely packed around it. Once the neighborhood around the hole which includes the object has an escape velocity greater than light (due to more matter accreting around the hole), then the object is inside the event horizon.

Re:Black holes

[StikyPad]

How can matter get to a given distance faster than the light? Or did matter not start emitting light until some time after the universe started expanding? Even if that's the case, the point where it started emitting light would be a lot closer than the point it's at now. If two objects move away from each other at a constant velocity, and Object A starts emitting light when they're 5M apart, doesn't the light reaching Object B STILL appear to have originated from 5M away, even if Object B is now 6M away from the point of the light's origin?

Also, if looking farther away == looking back in time, shouldn't we be able to extrapolate the observed position of "older"/farther celestial bodies compared to "newer"/closer ones to find a starting point? I've never understood why we can't find the center of the universe.. if we were an ember on a firework, we would be able to observe the (approximate) positions and velocities of other embers to calculate the starting point. Why doesn't this work for the universe?

Granted, Slashdot probably isn't the place to find answers to these questions, but I'm a glutton for punishment I guess.

Re:Black holes

[spiralx]

Seconded - it really covers all of this stuff in depth.

Re:Black holes

[Prof.Phreak]

...as the radius of the black is smaller than the radius of the universe...

According to relativity, the radius of a black hole is infinite (space is curved, etc.)

Re:Black holes

[SiliconEntity]

So what I'd like to know - is the surface area of all the black holes within the visible universe included in their calculations along with the surface area of the visible universe?
No.

If not, are even black holes simply holograms of the visible universe's surface area, thus making the information encoded in the black hole horizons redundant?
Yes.

Would including the black hole surface area significantly change the expected frequency of the holographic noise?
No, because as you guessed, it is the enclosing event horizon that matters, and ordinary black holes are controlled by holographic physics just like other phenomena.

This is actually the genesis of the holographic hypothesis. Turns out that black holes have the maximum entropy possible for objects of their size. And bizarrely, black hole entropy is a function of the area of the event horizon, not the volume of the black hole. The same thing applies with the event horizon that surrounds us, out at the edge of the visible universe. The entropy of the region within, the whole universe around us, is limited by the area of the event horizon, not the volume. This means that in some sense physics is constrained by two dimensional limitations, despite the fact that we seem to live in a three dimensional universe. Holograms have similar properties, hence the name.

10^(-16) meters?

[omuls are tasty]

The article states that the uncertaintly at the Planck scale at the (hypothetical) border could translate to something like 10^(-16)m scale in "our world"? But some 10 years ago when I was at some research facility near Padua, they had a gravitational wave detector which they claimed could detect movement on the scale of 10^(-21)m so that would suggest we can already make much more precise measurements. How would that be possible?

(Disclaimer if I'm missing something obvious: I'm not a physicist)

Re:10^(-16) meters?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years can change memory of 10^-12 into 10^-21

or

someone is citing wrongly

or

the GEO600 has a sensitivity of around 10^-22 for example, just to show that GEO600 is MORE sensitive than PaDUA, making it better at discerning spacetime graininess from other noise sources.

Re:10^(-16) meters?

[Anonymous Coward]

The GEO600 experiment is measuring movement between two points that are 600 meters apart.

It's entirely possible that the previous research facility you visited was measuring much more precisely - but over much shorter distances. They were probably also using a different method. And gravitational waves (still) haven't yet been detected, so there's a chance that the earlier experiment simply failed.

I can't comment more than that, I'm not a physicist either.

Re:10^(-16) meters?

[JakeyBob]

It's the specific layout of GEO that gives it an advantage in this case. Its output signal is constructed from the interference between two orthogonal laser beams, that have travelled down its 600m arms and back. In other similar detectors, the light bounces up and down the arms numerous times before interfering. GEO is currently the largest and most sensitive instrument that /doesn't/ use this technique, and while this makes it less sensitive to gravitational waves, it (somehow*) makes it especially susceptible to this holographic noise. *not a theorist!

Re:10^(-16) meters?

[omuls are tasty]

That's OK, but that's not what I was asking. If the Universe is inherently "holographic" and the uncertainty at the Planck scale - 10^(-34)m in the "real" Universe translates to uncertainty on the scale of 10^(-16)m in "our" world, how would it be possible to perform measurements on the scale of 10^(-21)m in our world, no matter which method you use?

It might be that my memory is failing me and that the actual number is different, but I do remember that we were all amazed that the number was orders of magnitude smaller than the (classical) radius of an electron, which is about 10^(-15)m

Book: The Holographic Universe - Michael Talbot

[ElBorba]

It's actually a challenging and inspiring read. The holographic principles of interference fields present an incredible perspective on the world we live in. It touches on spirituality, string theory, and quantum physics as well as good old material science.
MUST READ!
Amazon Link Here

Re:Book: The Holographic Universe - Michael Talbot

[Dieselle]

Definitely. It you are introspective about the unknown and the "Nature of Reality" this book is killer!

For those who don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Pringle" in this case is a synonym for "I don't know enough mathematics to call it a hyperbolic paraboloid".

Holodeck test

[Captain Spam]

Arch!

*pause*

ARCH!

*pause*

Computer, ARCH!

Hm. Must be something wrong with time and space. The universe's hologram controls are always the first thing to go wrong, as I learned on Star Trek. That and the mortality fail-safe. And... uh-oh.

Re:Holodeck test

[CompMD]

"That and the mortality fail-safe."

Is it bad that I read that as "That and the *moriarty* fail-safe"?

The Universe as a Holodeck

[argent]

Just so long as we haven't been sold to the Hirogens yet. That would suck.

Panruru

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I wish I were smarter. I love this kind of physics junk, but half of it always flies right over my head.

The Universe As Cellular Automaton?

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes me take a second look at this guy's ideas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin

Re:The Universe As Cellular Automaton?

[againjj]

Obligitory XKCD

Universe as 'carrier wave'?

[otis wildflower]

I wonder if what we observe as "collapsing the wave function" of matter is akin to "tuning it in", with the universe as an underlying "carrier wave"?

Scientific American said about it in 2003

[Tweenk]

I remember reading about the same proposition in a Scientific American article about 3 years ago (I used to read my national edition and there is a lag). However, they were basing the proposition on the analysis of the thermodynamical properties of black holes. Apparently the maximum entropy of a system is determined by the surface area of a sphere that encloses it. Above this limit the matter collapses into a black hole, which has an entropy proportional to its surface area.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=information-in-the-hologr-2003-08

Graviolis

[m3ntos]

If they prove gravitons exist I want a bowl of them, with a side of graviolis...

I had this theory years ago..

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been developing this exact theory for several years now. I discovered that the model of the atom is scarily similar to the interference pattern of a set of waves. This implies that matter is non-existent and everything we perceive is actually energy interfering with itself.

If you'd like to see proof of my assertion try this: Find a wave interference simulation program and let it simulate 2 wave sources interfering with one another and notice the pattern it gives. http://www.falstad.com/wavebox/ has one I think. If it's one of the 3D simulations then you should be able to rotate it and view it at several angles.

Now look at this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HAtomOrbitals.png and notice the similarity. Now read the caption for that image on this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics It states that the image shown are the "probability densities for the location of a particle in a hydrogen atom"; FYI, a hydrogen atom typically has 2 electrons. Those aren't probabilities of locating a particle, they're simply 2 waves interfering with one another.

There are other hints to my theory that this study probably haven't linked to this yet. For instance, a few months ago some scientists "discovered"(actually I think it was a computer simulation) that the innermost electrons of a lithium atom interact with electrons in other atoms, when it was originally thought that only the outermost electrons in any atom interacted. My theory already had this described and was never considered a limitation.

I have lots more hypotheses about this that I've been working on including how gravity and the forward-nature of time are related but I'm only publishing these on my website, not here yet as I'm not comfortable enough with the math involved to know how accurate they are.

Computer !

[slashdotlurker]

End Program

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_in_a_Bottle_(TNG_episode)

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a physicist either, but how would this tie into the expanding universe idea? If this were indeed a hologram, is more 'memory' being added to the hologram? Or is just that I haven't had enough coffee this morning to think about this properly?

Re:Pringle != Potato Chip

[Anonymous Coward]

...we must be living on a giant potato chip!

Wrong

Wow

[SoulRider]

Man, those interocitors are sure handy devices.

Computer....

[hodet]

End program

Re:Computer....

[Spatial]

Ah yes. I forgot to disable that in the last universe I built for you cretins. This time I'm one step ahead of you!

Heim Theory

[scorp1us]

I wonder if there is any relation at all to the "grains" and Heim's "metrons".

A single elementary particle is characterized not only by and the limiting distances R+- of its gravitational field, but also by its Compton wavelength. R- vanishes in empty space when the mass of the field source approaches zero, while R+, , and the Compton wavelength all diverge. However, since the smallest geometrical unit must be a real number and a property of empty space its value has to remain finite. As shown in [1], only a single product having this property can be formed from the 4 characteristic lengths above. The result is an area, , bounded on all sides by geodesics, whose present numerical value is = ca. 6.15x10-70 m2. This quantity, called a metron, represents the smallest area existing in empty space and requires the differential calculus to be replaced by a calculus of finite areas. Accordingly, a whole chapter in [1] is devoted to the development of a difference calculus considering the finite area of . This enables any differential expression to be metronized. It follows that in any subspace Rn, whose dimensionality n is divisible by 2, the geometrical continuum is replaced by a metronic lattice formed by n-dimensional volumes bounded on all sides by metrons. Thus, R6 and R12 are 6-dimensional and 12-dimensional metronic lattices, respectively. Since all dimensions are metronized, even time proceeds in finite, calculable steps. By the use of a difference calculus it becomes possible to consider in the nonlinear system of geometric structures in R6. - Bastic Thoughts of Heim's Theory

Yawn - this is a 25 year old theory

[nickull]

http://www.amazon.com/Holographic-Universe-Michael-Talbot/dp/0060922583 Michael Talbot wrote this book years ago. Others have had this theory since 1980-1985. Of course, if it is a hologram, those who created it might want you to read this comment. LOL! THe book itself was written in 1992.

Maybe space-time is not classical

[Livius]

Quantum mechanics conflicts with general relativity, so (probably) general relativity is wrong, and the true law of gravity is quantum-mechanical. This has been known for a long time.

Though measuring stuff like this is very cool.

Wonderful Book

[shambalagoon]

I highly recommend "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot, which talks a great deal on the topic. It takes the work of physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, and goes on to explain how the holographic model can easily explain paranormal and psychic phenomenon. I've studied mysticism, spirituality, physics, and neuroscience for ten years, and the holographic model fits perfectly with what people experience during waking life, in dreams, at near-death, and during other mystical experiences.

I realize that most Slashdot readers will look upon this with skepticism, but after all these years of research and study, I can honestly say that if this isn't the way the universe works, it's the way it should work.

Re:Wonderful Book

[screamphilling]

I can honestly say that if this isn't the way the universe works, it's the way it should work.

I also really enjoyed this book and should probably re-read it. It really forced me to re-evaluate the way my brain works. I particularly like the way he criticizes some of mainstream science's inability to handle this type of study. I will admit that some of his examples on the mysticism were a bit out there but then again the whole holographic theory encourages explanations of such phenomenon. as a veteran user of psychedelic drugs I'm going to have to strongly support the direction that this study is going. On my highest dose of psilocybin mushrooms, ego death occurred and I became a part of everything. the mystery is much deeper than we all can comprehend

Re:Wonderful Book

[Anonymous Coward]

Superstitious twit.

Re:Wonderful Book

[radtea]

I've studied mysticism, spirituality, physics, and neuroscience for ten years, and the holographic model fits perfectly with what people experience during waking life, in dreams, at near-death, and during other mystical experiences.

So it's almost certainly completely wrong, eh?

The one thing we have learned about physics in the past 2000 years is that it NEVER accords very directly with any common perceptions of the universe, which are the product of highly evolved heuristics rather than mathematically precise theorems.

The key difference between Newton's physics and Aristotle's is that Newton's physics is almost completely at odds with 'everyday experience'. Ignorant people, to this day, are apt to put their discussion of physics in Aristotelian terms, as those are the appropriate terms of description for our experience. They are, however, almost completely useless for describing or understanding the underlying ontology.

The great error of the all the failed mystics in the world is to confuse mentality with metaphysics, and think that their mental processes are in some way able to provide a key to the fundamental ontological mystery. But the history of science shows again and again that our mental processes are completely useless or even counter-productive when it comes to understanding the nature of non-mental reality. Failed mystics, who want so badly to claim that they have exclusive knowledge of the solution to the mystery (which makes it no mystery at all) continually ignore that fact, and gullible acolytes continually fail to call them on it.

Real mystics understand that there is no solution, and are content to wonder at the mystery while chipping away at the problems that do have solutions.

Re:Wonderful Book

[evilviper]

I can honestly say that if this isn't the way the universe works, it's the way it should work.

If the Universe refuses to follow Albert Frickin' Einstein's conceptions of how it should work, what chance do you think you've got?

Sorry Al, God throws dice all the time...

Re:Wonderful Book

[Anonymous Coward]

if this isn't the way the universe works, it's the way it should work.

This is why I don't trust engineers, developers, priests, psychics, gypsies, or religious folk. I don't care how it should work, I care how it does work!

Re:Wonderful Book

[earthbound kid]

Sorry Al, God throws dice all the time...

Not necessarily. The Bell experiments show that either God plays dice or God acts non-locally. The Bohmian interpretation, for example, hasn't yet been conclusively disproven, and it's deterministic.

Re:Wonderful Book

[Anonymous Coward]

the holographic model can easily explain paranormal and psychic phenomenon

sheer human stupidity and wishful thinking can easily explain paranormal and psychic phenomenon

Re:Wonderful Book

[DynaSoar]

I highly recommend "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot, which talks a great deal on the topic. It takes the work of physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, and goes on to explain how the holographic model can easily explain paranormal and psychic phenomenon. I've studied mysticism, spirituality, physics, and neuroscience for ten years, and the holographic model fits perfectly with what people experience during waking life, in dreams, at near-death, and during other mystical experiences.

I realize that most Slashdot readers will look upon this with skepticism, but after all these years of research and study, I can honestly say that if this isn't the way the universe works, it's the way it should work.

I highly recommend anyone suggesting a derivative work at least make an attempt to understand the originals to find out if the comparison is valid. Pribram's work with Bohm (continued with Bohm's partner, Basil Hiley, as well as Kunio Yasue and Mari Jibu) says nothing like the claims made by those who conduct journalism via buzzwords (Talbot being only one of many) who count on their readers being as clueless as themselves.

To begin with the title of Pribram's major work on the subject is "Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing". The definition of holonomy from Wikipedia says "In differential geometry, the holonomy of a connection on a smooth manifold is a general geometrical consequence of the curvature of the connection measuring the extent to which parallel transport around closed loops fails to preserve the geometrical data being transported." Of course if one takes the supporting evidence from the book and inserts "holography" instead, one is free to make all kinds of wild, unsupportable assertions, banking on appeal to an authority they can't understand. And if one is unlucky enough to make such an assertion in Karl's presence they'll be treated to a top-of-the-lungs tirade about the sin of stealing half an idea, muddying it up with imaginary material, and trying to credit someone with 60 years of serious work in the field with the utter bullshit.

Pribram does make an analogy between his proposed theory of inter-neuronal computation via interference of the varying electrical fields surrounding dendrites, and holography as an interference pattern, because both can contain far more information than non-interference based phenomena. He also states that one can use Denis Gabor's maths describing holography to describe this neural processing model (in principle only; computing billions of simultaneous dynamic interference patterns each with components progressing at a range of speeds covering several orders of magnitude is beyond foreseeable computational ability). But analogy is not equivalence, and being able to use a single mathematical system to describe two things does not make them similar any more than writing about both of them in the same language does.

If anyone is interested in Pribram's descriptions, his book is ISBN 0898599954, and you'll only need the first 3/4 of it. If you want to actually understand it, you'll need the last quarter -- the appendices -- which contains the combined efforts of Pribram, Bohm, Hiley, Yasue and Jibu. If anyone does manage to understand it from the appendices, please do let me know. If took me 2 years studying under Pribram to grasp it, including sitting in on a workshop with him, Hiley, Yasue and Jibu as they worked up update and expand on the material in the appendices.

If what Talbot says "fits perfectly with what people experience during waking life, in dreams, at near-death, and during other mystical experiences" but is as wrong as a football bat, I submit one is not "studying" mysticism. spirituality, physics and neuroscience -- rather one is simply believing things, which can be done with science as well as non-science, and when done with science is a far more egregious error.

I for one welcome WorShip . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea of the 'universe as a hologram' reminded me of Maya also. Specifically, the discussion of consciousness in Frank Herbert's Destination: Void http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination:_Void.

So, I for one welcome WorShip . . .

Re: causality

[Have Brain Will Rent]

I don't think all branches of science, well let's say all branches of Physics, require causality.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The next thing to try

[caywen]

The next experiment is to try to create a hologram that generates another hologram. Because a 3-level hologram would be awesome.

true...

[whopub]

You're right, He uses Visa, hates paypal and is considering leaving eBay for good and selling His shit elsewhere. Those pesky fees! What's a Guy gonna do...

Doesn't the holodeck work by creating force fields

[Anonymous Coward]

...and of course, creating any consumables with the food replicator.

That would explain why they can't teleport people off it!

I've often expressed this theory myself

[Renegade Iconoclast]

Here's a simple thought experiment. It isn't proof of anything, but it's interesting.

Let's say that we wanted to simulate the universe on a supercomputer.

The laws of physics and information theory seem to dictate that it's impossible to store that much information on a supercomputer, because you would need as much information as contained in the entire universe to do it accurately.

But what if you just simulated it roughly, unless you detected intelligence (decreased entropy) in your model? Whenever the intelligent things tried to study your model, you'd give them better and better information as they looked at smaller, and farther away things.

Eventually, though, you'd run out of information to give them, and you'd basically have to turn your pockets inside out.

For example, if they figured out how to change a texture in their world, they would notice that textures changed all over the place, seemingly randomly, because you're reusing them all over the place.

That the universe is a figment of someone's (or some THING's) imagination, to me, seems the simplest theory, not at all far out.

Re:I've often expressed this theory myself

[Renegade Iconoclast]

Oh, and I left out another detail.

If your creatures tried to find the smallest unit, they'd find a memory register, but they'd have no idea it was a memory register, and indeed would be physically incapable of directly observing it, ever.

Instead, it would appear to them as a wave form whenever they tried to measure the data, and the wave form would behave in rather erratic, energy-like ways (think tiny electrical surges), but at no point would ever seem "real".

Also, they would find themselves up the creek, when they discovered the smallest quantum of energy. How to explain this thing that's a wave, and not a particle, except when it is a particle, and that it has a specific size, except that it's not a particle unless you watch it, so how can it have any kind or size? (And just who is holding the measuring stick, anyway, dictating the size of energy??)

Seems so familiar it's like a dream, doesn't it? Or am I just mad?

Re:I've often expressed this theory myself

[John Hasler]

> That the universe is a figment of someone's (or some THING's) imagination, to me, seems
> the simplest theory...

And that THING is a figment of the imagination of another THING? Infinite regression?

Re:I've often expressed this theory myself

[Renegade Iconoclast]

Well, do you have a better theory?

I'm a devout atheist, I should say, in that I don't believe in a sky god named yahweh or thor, or anything.

The plank distance is a babelfish, as if we needed one.

Physics itself gave up long ago and admitted that all matter is a wave function. On top of that, some of the waves are distributed all over the matrix (pun intended), so that when we observe one, another impossibly changes instantly, even though it can't.

When you see fundamental contradictory results like that, you start to think crazy shit, like, maybe it really is a wave function. Real isn't real.

That's an example of binary thinking, though.

Here's my full theory. I'll give the hypothesis, a couple of falsifications, and some predictions.

Hypothesis: The universe is a sort of fiction, it is actually a mathematical formula, and our perception of it is not reality.

Falsified if: Gravity waves are found. I don't want to turn this into a novel, but this would falsify my theory. Faster than light particles are found. A "solid" object of the size of a tangerine is transported "instantly" through space.

All of these things would falsify my theory, because I think there are rules built in that are not transgressable.

Predictions:

The Planck distance is it, period. We will get no further, except through metaphysics and philosophy. We will find no particles traveling faster than light, as have been theorized. The more closely we observe the smaller things, the more we will see that they are unpredictable energy, and fundamentally unknowable. There will be no unified field theory.

Perhaps our universe is just a computer simulation

[Rick17JJ]

Yes, a holographic universe is one possibility, but as drinkypoo suggests, "a computer simulation which operates at a fixed clock rate," is also a possibility. The book, "The Universe Solved," mentions the possible non-continuous, quantized nature of time and space as evidence that the universe we are all living in may just be a computer simulation. That book was written by an Jim Elvidge, who is an electrical engineer.

Among other things, his book mentions some evidence that our world is not continuous, but rather quantized, or granular. He goes on to suggest that it would "take an infinite amount of resources to create a continuous reality, but a finite amount to create a quantized reality." For a computer generated virtual reality universe, it would be necessary that the universe could be described with a finite amount of resources.

If that is actually true, then it raises the question of who exactly God is? Is he (or she) the head programmer, or is he the owner of the computer, or perhaps he is an important computer generated part of the program itself. Perhaps his having God like powers are written into the program itself. Or perhaps the universe is not exactly computer generated, but just happens to have characteristics that are similar to what one might expect to find in a virtual reality simulation.

The Universe - Solved http://www.theuniversesolved.com/book.htm

There have also been several science fiction movies such as "The Thirteenth Floor" and "Dark City" which suggested that we might actually all be living in a computer generated virtual reality simulation.

Quantum gravity is not what they think it is

[sweetser]

Hello:

Been working on my own unified field theory in the basement. It is a variation on the Maxwell equations, the ones that are cow-roped to quantum mechanics unlike GR which doesn't play the game. The trick is to write the Maxwell action using quaternions, then swap in hypercomplex numbers for the quaternions (use wikipedia, those are real math terms).

To make the hypercomplex numbers a division algebra, that can be done by removing zero and all Eigenvalues of their matrix representation. That has consequences for quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics one looks for what all the Eigenvalues of a particular equation can be - those are the only values that can be observed. The calculation one does is to determine the odds of being at each particular value.

In my work with hypercomplex numbers, the system cannot ever be at its Eigenvalue. I have no idea how it is going to pan out, but it will not be like the other three known forces of Nature.

Doug

I see Star Trek possibilities...

[CFBMoo1]

From Me: Universe, please start beach babe program 101.

From Universe: Fatal error in beach babe execution. Dork array value out of range.

*sigh*

Nevermind...

David Bohm?

[Anonymous Coward]

For all those interested in previous theoretical work along these lines, consider researching David Bohm, a quantum physicist. He was one of the first I've found to posit a holographic model of the three dimensional universe. This is really thrilling stuff because the concepts involved are imaginable by even by those laypersons (such as myself) without having a good grasp on the secret order of "quantum mysticism" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_paradigm). Wikipedia may need an update if the Germans' experimental evidence holds up. I find the theory compelling and not too far of a stretch, especially when its competitors do require a lot more imaginative gymnastics (string theory, etc). But perhaps I am wrong - would this be a competitor for that theory?

Why do I need to know?

[pavon]

What does it matter? Science is the process of building and testing models that explain our observations. That's it. Whether our observations are "reality" or not doesn't change what science is. Believing that those observations are reality is not a prerequisite for doing science. On the flip side, science will always be limited by our observations and limited to models that are testable.

Thus no philosophy is needed to do science, and science is incapable of fulfilling the aim of philosophy, which is the search for truth. Science is not a subset of philosophy; they are about as orthogonal as you can get. Philosophy is useful for interpreting science, and the results of science is one of many things that people can use to shape their view of the world as a whole, but that is the extent of their relationship.

Re:Why do I need to know?

[smoker2]

How can you be so wrong ?

Philosophy is all about what you believe, not truth. Without science, your thoughts are nothing.

Without science, philosophy is worthless babble, fit for afternoon tv shows and idiots. Prove what you say or fuck off...
(if you have to take a time out to get the data together or to perform an experiment, you've already lost.)

No, it doesn't.

[pavon]

No it doesn't. Science intentionally limits itself to that which can be observed and tested in a rational manner. Science does not and cannot say that the Universe is actually like that. Some philosophers say that, most scientists say that, and all athiests say that, but Science itself does not make that assumption.

Re:No, it doesn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only half a day too late, but...

and all athiests say that

No, we don't. Where do you get this idea?

Re:No, it doesn't.

[lawpoop]

What is rationality and observation? It all starts from a metaphysical, and ultimately, a philosophical, position, my friend.

Re:No, it doesn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Science does not and cannot say that the Universe is actually like that. Some philosophers say that, most scientists say that, and all athiests say that...

Atheists? Where did that come from?

Do you believe Zeus exists?

No? Have you checked every cloud for a shirtless guy throwing lighting bolts?

What about Saturn, the god of agriculture? Tlaloc the god of rain? Odin the god of war?

Maybe you don't believe in these gods because you, like "atheists" and almost everyone else, believe the universe generally obeys cause-and-effect laws, and that these laws predict the implausibility of the existence of many gods humans have given names to.

An atheist and say, a christian, agree about the non-existence of various gods about 99.99% of the time. It's for that last .01% of gods that christians give up their belief in a rational universe.

Re:No, it doesn't.

[faboo]

Back when I was an atheist, I did not consider that the universe is necessarily rational top-to-bottom. In fact, the lack of theistic belief does not rule out the "supernatural". Atheism does rule out a centrally directed supernatural, but there's no reason an atheist couldn't consider ghosts or karma or reincarnation a possibility.

Magnetic Resonance imaging force microscope?

[zymano]

Why hasn't NMRI Force microscope hasn't seen this?

No "gravity" waves, 'ey?

[grikdog]

Well, if Carl "Just Look Around" Sagan was right, and we're living in a recursive universe inside a black hole, then it follows that "background radiation" is our own event horizon observed from the wrong side and "gravity waves" would simply be time itself. As far as "blurry focus" goes, that's just an ordinary quantum effect, waves being particles.

Residual Galactic Noise Explained

[cyberspittle]

That freaking noise is the big bang

Re: causality

[tenco]

You care to list some? And: I think you can't do measurements without having some idea of interaction (quantifiable object measurement device) which depends on causality.

Vindicated again

[nurb432]

I proposed this basic theory back in the early 80's and it wasn't taken seriously.

Cool!

Re: causality

[Have Brain Will Rent]

OK. The way most people use the word causality implies a deterministic process, and usually also one where time moves in a specific direction (even though there is no fundamental reason that we can't run the projector backwards). Or put another way causality requires 100% repeatability and by implication deterministic predictability - or vice versa if you prefer. It seems to me that QM doesn't rely on causality in that way.

Here is a better explaination

[NotQuiteReal]

All is revealed here.

Did that clear things up?

Re:Here is a better explaination

[Hurricane78]

I don't know... Can you translate it...like...to... to... AN ACTUAL LANGUAGE?? ;)

Re:Here is a better explaination

[iNaya]

What the hell! I thought I had seen the stupidest of the stupidest when I first saw digg. I have now been proven wrong. Not only that, but reading just 2 pages of that has made my life worth many fold times less.

Lumpy Quantum Gravy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh. Sorry, no. That tag was "loopquantumgravity"

As a physicist i say:

[drolli]

Normally "New Scientist" reports about work already published in other Journals, and we should keep it that way. I am working on something completely different, but also busy with noise (in the quantum limit) and i can say that even if the experiments i do are extremely simple - i would say trivial - in comparison to this absolutely amazing interferometer, there are a *lot of sources* of spurious noise. Working for one year scratching your head about a specific source of noise is nothing unusual.

Science more than Philosophy

[Roger W Moore]

Until very recently, science was called natural philosophy. All the sciences have their origins in philosophy...

What you say is correct. However this does not mean that science is a subset of philosophy. The key difference is that science requires more than thought: it requires a physical universe to observe and test. It may then use philosophy to interpret and infer how that universe works but there is more than just thought involved.

Re:Science more than Philosophy

[Ardeaem]

Who ever said philosophy precluded observation? Obviously not the scientists in the recent past, or else they wouldn't have called science "natural philosophy." That was my point. It is only recently that this science vs philosophy mindset kicked in, and I don't understand the origin of it.

I guess when you define philosophy in such a way that it cannot include observation, you make your point correct by definition. Is that really a historically aware, useful definition of philosophy? I don't think so, and neither did scientists in the past; that was the point I was trying to make.

Re:Science more than Philosophy

[Roger W Moore]

Without intelligent life in the universe there would clearly be no philosophy. However the universe would still have laws of physics. Thus physics cannot be a subset of philosophy because it can exist without it. This might be a change since the 18th/19th century but given our huge improvement in understanding since then I would not regard historical definitions as a particularly accurate guide. Personally I think that the reason science grew out of philosophy is simply because philosophy was the only option available for the scientific mind several hundred years or more ago.

Wait!

[peddamat]

Errr.... So, the Earth *is* flat?

Not just science

[Anonymous Coward]

But engineering and computing too. Sometimes "smart" people think they are smart but never bothered to really think about things.

Smartness != "Passed My Differentail Equation Course"

Smartness != "I can use google"

Smartness != "I can make a spreadsheet to prove something"

A truly humble, smart person starts off assuming what they know is wrong, not right. The best people know that the sum of everything they know amounts to a hill of beans in the big scheme of things. Knowing you dont know anything is what makes life interesting.

No way

[coryking]

That choice was made using philosophy, which is what underpins science.

This statement: "regardless of whether there's any Universal Truth or Falsehood to general relativity" is a philosophical statement. The fact that you believe there is no universal truth is a philosophical statement. In fact, pretty much your entire post asks all kinds of deep, very important philosophical questions.

Me thinks you dont know what philosophy means.

Re:No way

[DamnStupidElf]

You're confusing the issue. If I said I believed in universal truth, or not, that would be philosophy. I said *regardless* of the existence of universal truth or even the truth of individual theorems, there will be successful predictions and unsuccessful ones. The successful predictions will allow the predictor to survive and reproduce. The predictions that are successful are completely defined by the universe, not by philosophy. Hence, my prediction in this post may be completely wrong, but that has nothing to do with philosophy either, instead it depends on what actually happens in the universe.

And it's hanging

[DinDaddy]

. . . on Orion's belt?

Damn cat.

"The Holographic Universe" Copyright 1991!!!!

[Dieselle]

Seriously? None of you geeks have read "The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot???? This book is a seminal work, IMHO. You will find yourselves re-reading each page, thinking "Holy s**t did he just say what I think he said!" It's mind blowing for those of you with any education in physics/quantum mechanics and a real capacity to think outside the box. I'll be damned, fringe science isn't so "fringe" anymore. AWESOME!!!

hollow grams

[mmwithpeanuts]

in order to have a hologram, there must be first 'real' objects, or in this case, a real universe in which to make the holographic universe from; so we wrap around 'reality' no matter how 'mystical we think we are. Grains are subjected to many possibilities from overworked formulas to gods forgetting to focus the material as it is being played on the backwalls of our minds. Soon these grains will clear, and our universe will survive another 'unreal' blast of super nova'd stardust memories. If we conclude we are within the confines of a massive blackhole, anything we see is possible; then soon we will come out into the light of day, like a seed which has burst, sprouting upward and out, seeking sun rays!

Coincidence?

[woodycat]

I have just started taking an interest in Kabbalah. The main concept in it is that reality is truly created elsewhere;it is created in a more vast spiritual realm around us not here in the physical or corporeal universe.

COMPUTER

[Carbon016]

HALT PROGRAM!

Needed startrek reference

[submain]

Computer, end program.

A plate on a tiger on an elephant on a turtle...

[symbolset]

And after that it's Turtles all the way down.

size of volume pixel (grain)

[veriti]

Interestingly,

1) The number of grains is about 10^123. Number 123 sounds familiar.
2) Changing the size (radius) of the universe from 15 billion years to say 30 billion years does not change the size of the volume grain that much, which is about the size of an electron! Wikipedia says: "The classical electron radius is 2.8179 × 1015 m"
3) You can try to back calculate the size (radius) of the universe, given that the size of the volume grain is equal to the size of the electron.. It turns to be 27.2 billion years (which might be about twice as much as the size of the currently visible universe.)

Here are the back of the envelope calculations:

Radius of the universe, assume, = 15 billion light years = 4.73*10^17 light seconds
Speed of light = 3.00 * 10^8 m/s
Universe radius, r = 3.00*10^8 m/s * 4.73*10^17 s = 1.42*10^42 m
Area of the sphere of the universe, A = 4*pi*r^2 = 2.53*10^53 m^2
Volume of the sphere of the universe, V = 4/3*pi*r^3 = 1.20*10^79 m^3

Planck distance = 1.616*10^-35 m
Number of pixels (grains of the size of Plank distance) on a square meter = 3.83*10^69
Number of pixels (grains) on the sphere, Ns = 9.69*10^122

size of volume pixels (grains) in the volume of the sphere, rV = 1/ [ ( Ns / V ) ^ (1/3) ] = 2.13*10^-15m

(check: number of volume grains in the universe = number of grains in 1m^3 * volume of universe in meters = (1/2.13*10^-15)^3 * 1.20*10^73 m^3 = 9.69*10^122)
nanotech.republika.pl

The universe as a hologram

[Breez911]

From the English version of The Book of Errors! aka KJV Scriptres.

One of the earliest recorded human errors of communication. When using proouns; it is mandetory; person, and case match the noun represented. Failure in this, causes errors in comprehension!

Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image,....

us: Personal. 1st person plural. man: Personal. 3rd person singular. our: Possesive. 1st person plural.

So "god", as does a mirror, caused the human in human image, in the image and likeness, of The creator, that was being created, as The Cosmos.

Isaiah 40:18 To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him?

Human erronious comprehension of Genesis 1:26; Caused the first of the many Identity thefts, a villainy widely practiced throuought ci-vil-ize-ation!

So humans being images, may well be mistaken for holographic images, in a hologram. For the scriptures tell quite clearly; Humans, are only images!

God revealed this in Islam 1400 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Not surprising to any Muslim.

We believe God revealed this to us through all warners / prophets since man was first put on Earth.
You can find it in the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, Torah, Bible, and of course the Only un-altered speech of God - the Holy Quran.

"Verily, the Promise of Allah is true, let not then this (worldly) present life deceive you, nor let the chief deceiver (Satan) deceive you about Allah."
- al-Qur'an - Surah Luqmaan (31).

But when He delivered them, behold! They rebel (disobey Allah) in the earth wrongfully. O mankind! Your rebellion (disobedience to Allah) is only against your ownselves, - a brief enjoyment of this worldly life, then (in the end) unto Us is your return, and We shall inform you that which you used to do.
- al-Qur'an, Surah Yunus (Jonah) (10).

"This, because you took the revelations of Allah (this Qur'an) in mockery, and the life of the world deceived you. So this Day, they shall not be taken out from there (Hell), nor shall they be Yustaa'taboon (i.e. they shall not return to the worldly life, so that they repent to Allah, and beg His Pardon for their sins."
- al-Qur'an - al-Jathiyah (45)

--
wislam