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

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?

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

[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.