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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.
[pulls out 3-D glasses]
That we're all living on a small anti-counterfeiting patch on God's MasterCard?
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Nope, not a hologram.
Mine is Good
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?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
If so I want my own personal universe.
Do you D?
There is no spoon?
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!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You could try starting by reading the article, which is mostly about experimental verification of previously untested theories.
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.
This just in, Red Dwarf's Rimmer and Voyager's doctor upset, complain of "hologram of a hologram" prejudice.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
This story reminds me of an amazing book written in the late 1800's, "Flatland", which applies today more than ever.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Is New Scientist a quality publication or one prone to sensationalism? I don't know much about the science news scene in the USA.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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?
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
The small anti-counterfeiting patch on my MasterCard could be...
One tiny little universe.
If the 3-dimensional universe is actually a 2-dimensional hologram, then maybe the whole thing is stored in RAM in some computer?
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Ceci n'est pas une pipe?
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.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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.
will i am agrees!
Screw that! I'm getting drunk NOW!
Woohoo!
What?
I, for one, welcome our new Matrix overlords, and will be on the holodeck if you need me.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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!
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?
-- there is no sig
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.
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.
My blog
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.
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.
E pluribus unum
Definitely not. "intellegent design" is a religion not science.
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?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
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.
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.
Actually, this is a proposed aspect of String Theory according to TFA. So the two appear to be a bit intertwined. (Pun not intended.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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)
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
"The Borba"
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.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
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.
This makes me take a second look at this guy's ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin
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.
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.
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"?
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
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
If they prove gravitons exist I want a bowl of them, with a side of graviolis...
End Program
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_in_a_Bottle_(TNG_episode)
Man, those interocitors are sure handy devices.
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.
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
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
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.
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 don't think all branches of science, well let's say all branches of Physics, require causality.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The next experiment is to try to create a hologram that generates another hologram. Because a 3-level hologram would be awesome.
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...
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!
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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.
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
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
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...
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
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.
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.
Why hasn't NMRI Force microscope hasn't seen this?
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
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
That freaking noise is the big bang
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.
I proposed this basic theory back in the early 80's and it wasn't taken seriously.
Cool!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
All is revealed here.
Did that clear things up?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
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.
Errr.... So, the Earth *is* flat?
Sumanth Peddamatham @ bafoontecha.com: Theory meets application.
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.
. . . on Orion's belt?
Damn cat.
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!!!
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!
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.
HALT PROGRAM!
Computer, end program.
And after that it's Turtles all the way down.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
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!