Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
Table-ized A.I.