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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.
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.
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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?
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You could try starting by reading the article, which is mostly about experimental verification of previously untested theories.
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.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe?
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.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
"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.
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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.
Jeremy
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.
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