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Simulations Back Up Theory That Universe Is a Hologram

ananyo writes "A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection. In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity. Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive. In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena's conjecture is true."

433 comments

  1. bah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    this would make boobs boring. don't believe it.

    1. Re:bah by rubycodez · · Score: 5, Funny

      nonsense, it makes boobs awesome holographic porn, projected from a surface.

    2. Re:bah by mythosaz · · Score: 5, Funny

      nonsense, it makes boobs awesome holographic porn, projected from a surface.

      RT or Pro?

    3. Re:bah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Depends on if you prefer camgirls or staged productions

    4. Re:bah by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players..." -W.S.

  2. A projection of what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Seems like hand-waving to call it a "projection".

    1. Re:A projection of what? by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If I understand this wikipedia article correctly, it's a projection of the universe's cosmological event horizon. So think of it as being caused by turbulence the "blast wave" produced by the big bang.

    2. Re:A projection of what? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      The more science becomes science fiction, the less like science it is and the more like religion it is.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    3. Re:A projection of what? by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 1

      If I understand this wikipedia article correctly, it's a projection of the universe's cosmological event horizon. So think of it as being caused by turbulence the "blast wave" produced by the big bang.

      So, we are pan dimensional spume...

      --
      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
    4. Re:A projection of what? by suutar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I can see your point, but as long as it makes predictions I'm willing to keep it in a separate category.

    5. Re:A projection of what? by geekoid · · Score: 1

      no, it is not. Not by any stretch.

      All you post tells me is tat you don't know what science is; or possible, but unlikely, what religion is..

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    6. Re:A projection of what? by Oligonicella · · Score: 1, Flamebait

      One can manipulate math to to describe or answer pretty much anything you want. Just because the equations match what's happening does not mean they describe what's going on.

    7. Re:A projection of what? by CapOblivious2010 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      One can manipulate math to to describe or answer pretty much anything you want. Just because the equations match what's happening does not mean they describe what's going on.

      Who cares? As long as the equations match what's happening (and what's going to happen), does it matter what's "really" going on? We've been doing quantum mechanics for almost a century now, and still no one actually knows what it all means - but we're perfectly happy to take advantage of QM in our technology.

    8. Re:A projection of what? by suutar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Certainly, you can describe anything with equations, and you can come up with multiple mathematical descriptions that match what you know. But they'll make different predictions, which can be tested, and that's where the value of generating a mathematical description is. If you're not looking for predictions you can just say "that's the way it is," skip the math, and move on to something else.

    9. Re:A projection of what? by Zencyde · · Score: 1

      We're all basically swirling bits of matter, aren't we? The matter that enters your body will leave at some point. Everything is always in a flowing motion. Some things faster than others. That the sum of life is just some turbulence is a pretty poetic thought. Yes, one that brings solace.

      --
      What day is it? Could you please tell me?
    10. Re:A projection of what? by TopherC · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Mathematics, especially in this context, is just a language for expressing ideas. So I think that in some sense it is possible that some particular string theory really does describe what's going on. I don't know if it's very likely, but the idea of a "final theory" is that it is, in some sense, a complete and accurate description of our universe's mechanics. (The holographic principle is nice because it states that two seemingly very different theories can actually be equivalent.)

      I think there are two main caveats here. One is that you never really know when you're "done", and have a theory that is indeed final. We know now that we are not done today because of inconsistencies, but science also does not have even the capability of perfect validation. The other is that a microscopic, reductionist description of physics is not useful or even the correct language for describing more macroscopic effects since basically "more is different." Chemists don't use quantum field theory because it's just not helpful.

      And while it's great (even important) to consider philosophical ramifications of theoretical work like this, we have to remember that it's all still conjecture and it will probably always be conjecture. The philosophical spin-offs, so to speak, should never be taken as a way of either supporting or condemning the theory.

      I think I'm basically summarizing some of what Wienberg describes in his book Dreams of a Final Theory (1993). That seems old but I highly recommend it!

    11. Re:A projection of what? by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      One can manipulate math to to describe or answer pretty much anything you want. Just because the equations match what's happening does not mean they describe what's going on.

      Who cares? As long as the equations match what's happening (and what's going to happen), does it matter what's "really" going on? We've been doing quantum mechanics for almost a century now, and still no one actually knows what it all means - but we're perfectly happy to take advantage of QM in our technology.

      Yes, it really matters. In the middle ages, there were mathematical formulas which described the planets and sun revolving around the earth. The math worked very well even though the theory was proven to be very wrong.

      Math, particularly when used as a language, can be used to describe all sorts of things. As with the spoken language, one can create a sentence that is technically and grammatically correct, but still is nonsense. The whole purpose of langauge, any language, even mathematics is to convey ideas. So, yes, it really does matter what's going on. That's the whole point of using a precision language, like math, in the first place.

    12. Re:A projection of what? by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      no, it is not. Not by any stretch.

      All you post tells me is tat you don't know what science is; or possible, but unlikely, what religion is..

      Actually, for most lay people, science and religion are very similar as they both require one to accept things on the faith or testimony of others. Very few people have actually done the calculations or proofs or expirments themself, instead relying on what has been passed down to them by the high priests. That is just as true for science as religion, with the exception that when dealing with science we don't use the term "high priests," but instead some other term, but the process is the same. Those with special insight pass on the belief system to the next generation.

      Not all religions have a deity, but all religions have a belief system. So, too, does science.

    13. Re:A projection of what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Instrumentalism won. Get over it.

    14. Re:A projection of what? by HiThere · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What do you mean it was proven wrong? It never was, and it hasn't been yet. It probably can't be. (Well, except in the sense that Newtonian Mechanics was wrong.)

      What was proven was that the heliocentric theory was a lot easier to calculate. And you didn't need to keep adding on as many special correction factors each time the instruments improved. So now we're doing relativity and quantum mechanics, and they are just means of calculation. Relativity doesn't really define an interpretation, and Quantum Mechanics is consistent with multiple different interpretations. The different interpretations seem quite different when described in English, but the math is exactly the same. You can't chose between the multi-world interpretation and Solipsism on the basis of evidence, you need to choose on the basis of philosophical biases.

      Just consider, Relativity talks about bent spaces, but in what direction is space bent? Well, that's not clear. Perhaps saying bent is just something to enable you to understand that what we're really talking about is lengths being longer in one direction than in another, but that's just gibberish. You CAN'T translate Relativity into English and have it really make sense, any more than quantum mechanics. The last one you could "pretty much" do that with was Newtonian Mechanics, and if you really think carefully about that, you also find places where you must follow the math rather than reason. Just try to think carefully about what an infinitesimal means, or an imaginary number. You can't. You're just used to them, so you slide over the places where they are incomprehensible.

      FWIW, I don't understand pre-Newtonian mechanics well enough, but I'm rather certain that they had equally incomprehensible places. Think of Cantor's proofs, and then try to imagine what it means to paint one copy of the interval of real number red and another blue. Or Zeno's paradoxes.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    15. Re:A projection of what? by haruchai · · Score: 4, Insightful

      At some point, science has to put forth something that's not only consistent but testable. Religion appears to be exempt from that troublesome requirement.
      And a scientific theory can be falsified by new evidence. Religion, not so much.

      As for science having a "belief system", I strongly suggest you not attempt to "disbelieve" in gravity while near the edge of a high building or in electromagnetism while sticking an uninsulated conductor into a live socket.

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    16. Re:A projection of what? by haruchai · · Score: 1

      Only if Pan's your daddy.

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    17. Re:A projection of what? by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Well, to be fair, math isn't science. Math is a system of statements. It may be complete, it may be consistent, but it can't be both. Not if it can describe very much.

      A particular set of math statements can have in interpretation that can describe an interface between the math and the physical universe. This interpretation can be either true or false. The math can only be either correct or incorrect. (i.e., 1 + 3 = 5 is incorrect in most systems of math. You could design one in which it was correct. Say a bounded set of integers where all numbers >= 4 had the same value. It might not be useful for much.)

      So. When you have an interpretation of a system of math, it can be a bijective isomorphism to some abstraction from the physical world. Then if you observe something in the physical world, it should be derivable from the math. (If, that is, you have an appropriate rule of inference. And example of a place where we don't is radioactive decay.) And if you derive something from the math, you should be able to observe it in the physical world (if you can perform the experiment). If either of these fails, then you know that either you made a mistake in the math, or that the isomorphism was incorrectly assumed to apply.

      The science part is taking predictions and validating them, and the making observations and deriving them. The math isn't science. the interpretation isn't science (that's more philosophy).

      So. To me this looks like math, not like science. There's a close relationship, but it's not the same thing.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    18. Re:A projection of what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unless you directly participate in something, you must go off of belief of other's words. As repeatable it is to put someone in space, I have never been there. I must go on belief.

    19. Re:A projection of what? by Artifakt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As for science having a "belief system", I strongly suggest you not attempt to "disbelieve" in gravity while near the edge of a high building or in electromagnetism while sticking an uninsulated conductor into a live socket.

      That's an absolutly miserable analogy. Gravity and Electricity in themselves aren't the same as the Scientific Laws describing Gravity or Electricity. People still died from falling off cliffs before Newton ever put some math to Gravity. Disbelieving that Newton has correctly described Gravity with the inverse square equations may mean you will screw up your Moon-shot, but it never made anybody jump off a cliff and hope to fly, and a lot of people built heavier than air craft that failed to fly before anyone got it right, even though they did believe in Newton's laws.

      Scientific axioms are ideas such as Naturalism (meaning simply "the rejection of the Supernatural as a possible explanation for a given phenomenon", not the whole, complex philosophy we would properly call Naturalism). The principle that a theory must make testable predictions to be a part of Science is one of those Axioms of Science, as you yourself point out. You just cited a big part of Science's belief system as proof it doesn't have a belief system. A given theorem, i.e. Alfred Wegener's continental drift hypothesis, Darwin and Wallace's Natural Selection, or even Einstein's General Relativity is NOT part of the belief systems of Science - such things are the results of applying the Scientific Method, and it's the things that make up the method itself that count as belief systems. Again, the results of the method are not, and can NEVER be, themselves part of the method, in just the way Korzibski said "The map is not the territory".

      I, you, or anyone else can certainly build theories that are not scientific, in that they can't be tested. Does that mean they have negative value, (in a way analogous to your "falling off a high building" analogy)?. Not at all. I can devise an idea that can't currently be tested but might be testable later (Ideas can become scientific with time, as new technologies make it possible to test things we once couldn't, but there is no Axiom of Science that explains, for all hypothesi, how to judge in advance whether a hypothesis can ever become scientific or not), I can speculate about subjects that don't fall under Strict Naturalism at all, such as what another person was thinking when they did the action I observed. I can judge various matters by a different standard than in Science (such as applying a legalstandard instead of a scientific one in determining whether someone is guilty of a crime.

      None of that deserves to analogized to various forms of painful death inflicted on people for not 'believing'. Acknowledging that Science has a belief system may not count as making it into a religion, but when you conflate specific theories with the method, and then use that to threaten non-believers with painful consequences for their non-belief, you've definitely started treating Science as a religion.

      Read some Kurt Gödel, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Karl Popper, please.

      --
      Who is John Cabal?
    20. Re:A projection of what? by TapeCutter · · Score: 2

      Just because the equations match what's happening does not mean they describe what's going on.

      Yes and physics has operated very well for the last hundred years based on that method. All that counts is that it can predict what will happen, ie: can it be tested. The more phenomena it can be applied to the better.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    21. Re:A projection of what? by TapeCutter · · Score: 2

      The interpretation put on the ancient greek math and accepted as "gospel" by medieval scholars was shown to be deficient in the 1600's, the Greek math itself gave more accurate results for at least a century after Copernicus went to his grave. This was the beginning of the enlightenment which told us there's no way to prove any particular interpretation is correct, all you can really do is compare the scope and accuracy of the predictions between competing theories, (including the theory that "god done it").

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    22. Re:A projection of what? by fonske · · Score: 1

      Testable, indeed, but always from an observation standpoint to which can be referenced to reproduce these tests (=consistency). Since an absolute, grand unifying, written-in-stone standpoint does not exist -ie human observation is limited by its senses- I will gladly accept (a tiny bit) of herd behaviour around a mystical energy pool that linguistically is referred to as God.
      The bloody rooted "Christendom" led by one (male) pope, the tribal herd behaviour of Muslim (tribalism being exactly what the Prophet tried to fight by unifying under Allah (= Arab for God)), the predecessor Bhudism with its way to enlightenment and Hinduism before Bhudism with Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva as a trimurti around the energy pool and the mythical tales even before that should instigate a critical stance to what happens around you (=observation).
      Religion so wants to let you believe in its holy guiding lines to live by, it should put a healthy bloke on his "qui vive" (a gallicism in Flemish as a way of referring to extreme alert behaviour).
      This "qui vive" is a great departure point for science.

    23. Re:A projection of what? by bingoUV · · Score: 1

      Yes, it really matters. In the middle ages, there were mathematical formulas which described the planets and sun revolving around the earth. The math worked very well even though the theory was proven to be very wrong.

      There is nothing "wrong" with most of them. Except some of those that had slight mismatch between theory and observation that were fixed by taking relativity into account, most of the theory was not "wrong". Some were wrong because of insisting on circular orbits instead of elliptical. But geocentricity by itself never was "wrong".

      Geocentricity does make lot of calculations so complex as to be not doable without computer assistance that came much later into wide acceptance of heliocentricism. That also leads to inaccuracies in calculations.

      I repeat - while heliocentricism is preferable, geocentricism is not "wrong".

      --
      Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
    24. Re:A projection of what? by brantondaveperson · · Score: 1

      I do not believe that this is true at all.

      Or at least, I don't believe that it ought to be true - or that it is necessarily true.

      Science, or rather recent scientific findings, are generally transmitted to the wider population via the media. Science itself, as is often noted on this site, is not a collection of articles of faith - but a process. Religion is not a process, it is a collection of articles of faith. This is the difference. Science, the process, generates as its output a set of testable hypotheses. Some of these, some of the more esoteric ones related to subatomic particles and so-on, are rather hard to test. But the evidence that things like Quantum Mechanics and Relativity work are all around us. Computers are GPS would neither be where they are today if it were not for the hypotheses tested by the scientific method.

      Now the media, that's another story. If the wider population's exposure to this set of hypotheses - any of which could in principal be overturned at any time - is only through the more or less illiterate scribblings of the popular media, then yes. Everything is taken on faith, and in this sense we do have what is effectively a religion. This is because the scientific community is woeful at explanations digestible by the general public, and usually hedge their bets in rather unconvincing ways. They may say 'there is no evidence for', meaning 'it's probably not true, but this is a process and more research is always needed'. That's not terribly convincing, and the popular media pick up the slack.

    25. Re:A projection of what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is a wonderful post, but I've already commented and thus can't give you the +5 insightful that it deserves.

    26. Re:A projection of what? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      Religions make accurate predictions within their axiomatic set- if they didn't, they wouldn't survive more than one generation (and in fact, many smaller cults *don't* survive the death of their founder, that's pretty much the difference between a cult of personality and an actual belief system- their predictions don't survive being tested). So I fail to see your difference. Science makes accurate predictions within its axiomatic set, and theories that don't make accurate predictions are thrown out. What is the difference between that, and the religious system that makes accurate predictions within its axiomatic set and calls inaccurate predictions heresy and throws them out?

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    27. Re: A projection of what? by Ac2 · · Score: 1

      Or perhaps there indeed was no big bang and something just touched this big 2d balloon getting its surface to rimple causing us to come into existenze. And it would explain why the universe seems to expand: the rimpels are getting less. Of course the balloon is not really a balloon, it just a first discriptional hook to let our 3d minds get used to the first idea. In real there is no spoon. Uh, o I mean balloon.

    28. Re:A projection of what? by suutar · · Score: 1

      Really? The only predictions I know of from most religions are what's going to happen after you die, and those are difficult at best to test. Can you give some examples?

    29. Re:A projection of what? by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 1

      The whole question revolves around how do we know what we know. We have two choices. We can either experience it or we can rely on the testimony of another. This is true whether we are talking about people, or science or even religion. Those are the only two options. With science, to experience it means to conduct/repeat the experiment (or do the math).

      However, for most of us, we don't do that. Instead knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next by teachers or books or today, the media and internet. As such, we don't have first hand knowledge but rely on other people who have gone before us. Now look at religion, it really doesn't matter which one. How are the precepts of that religion transmitted from one generation to the next? It is the same way, they go through teachers, books, or today, the media and internet.

      Now, there are differences, because with science, one does have the opportunity to conduct the experiment, whereas, with religion, while many claim an "experience" it is hard to quantify and is usually quite subjective.

      But, unless one actually does the experiment, they don't know first hand, and are really accepting on faith the testimony from those who came before them. Yes, the earth revolves around the sun. Ask yourself how you know that? Have you gone far enough into space where you can actually see it? Probably not. Have you conducted the mathematical calculations and observations to make that determination yourself? Probably not? Or are you accepting the testimony from others that this actually occurs? For most people that is the correct answer.

      Accepting science on faith doesn't lessen the science. However, it is really the same process that people of faith use for their beliefs. Denying that most of what we know about science is not true knowledge, but instead belief or faith, however, denies the entire scientific process.

      In reality, it is a philosophical question "How do we know what we know?" Of course, science doesn't like philosophy any more than it likes religion.

    30. Re:A projection of what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, as the total information content of the universe increases (entropy), the actual surface area of the universe has to increase to maintain that information. Vice versa, the reason entropy increases is because the surface area of the event horizon is increasing.

      That's what you're saying, right?

    31. Re:A projection of what? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      One of the more modern ones was the Roman Catholic Papal Encyclical Humanae Vitae, which listed four specific predictions on what would happen in a culture that failed to respect life.

      You may not accept the axioms, but the reasoning was sound, and within those axioms, all four items have indeed come true in the United States, at least.

      I realize this example is a bit mundane, and really is no better than what many sociologists have also predicted, but I'm trying to point out that reason and religion are not necessarily enemies.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    32. Re:A projection of what? by lennier · · Score: 1

      Read some Kurt Gödel, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Karl Popper, please.

      I started to, but when I got to the part where it tried to falsify itself, I decided to switch paradigms.

      --
      You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
    33. Re:A projection of what? by suutar · · Score: 1

      Ah, sociological predictions. That's a good point, but is that really a prediction from the religion, or is it a prediction from a religious authority who's also a social scientist? It seems likely that anyone who can successfully become Pope (or even just a Cardinal) must be a good observer of human nature.

    34. Re:A projection of what? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      And that, actually, is a good point- that a successful religion *must* have some reason behind it. Observation and theorization based on human nature, is most of what theology really is. In a way it is misnamed. It isn't study of God. It is study of human reaction to God, and thus is a sub-branch of sociology to begin with.

      It took a rational religion to create the scientific method. I'd suggest that it takes at least a reasonable religion to survive more than a few generations at all.

      But I seem to have strayed from my original, which wasn't so much about religious theology being within the bounds of its own axioms, but science straying away from testable predictions and into fictional, non testable, conclusions. Others in this thread, however, have pointed out that's more "pop sci" than science, more media than actual experimentation. Including in the case of the original article, which was using the primary definition of a hologram (that is, an n+1 dimensional object encoded into n-dimensional space) as opposed to the popular definition of a hologram (a simulation of a n+1 dimensional object projected from an n-dimensional projector). Another good example of the later is Richard Dawkin's Selfish Gene- complete science fiction analogy masquerading as science.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    35. Re:A projection of what? by mestar · · Score: 1

      Show us those formulas, and specifically where they say the Earth is in the center.

      It math works, that's enough.

    36. Re:A projection of what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And Marxism.

    37. Re:A projection of what? by brantondaveperson · · Score: 1

      Odd arguments, and an odd position.

      Perhaps you should read a little more widely on the Philosophy of Science before you suggest that 'Science' doesn't 'like' philosophy. Additionally, science is not a 'thing', that can like or dislike anything.

      Accepting science on faith doesn't lessen the science.

      Yes, it does.

      You seem to stick to the idea that the corpus of knowledge gathered through the scientific method is the same thing as the scientific method itself. The difference has already been explained by another poster rather more eloquently than I could. Religious people accept religious truths on faith, whereas those of a more scientific frame of mind accept scientific hypotheses on the basis that they rest upon evidence. They may accept that the evidence exists by trusting those in the scientific community to not pull the wool over their eyes, but this is not the same thing as accepting the hypotheses itself on faith.

    38. Re:A projection of what? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      Marxism was always religion. That's why the actual revolutionaries attempted to enforce atheism by law, so that the people would have no other hope than the State.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    39. Re:A projection of what? by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 1

      Show us those formulas, and specifically where they say the Earth is in the center.

      It math works, that's enough.

      You might try reading up on Ptolemy and his successors up until the time of Copernicus (I think Tycho Brahe was a major contemporary of Copernicus who was in the Ptolemic camp). Copernicus was not the first to propose a heliocentric model but his math worked on it. Of course, his theories were later found to be in error, which is what Galileo in trouble, but hey, the math worked, even if the model was wrong.

    40. Re:A projection of what? by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 2

      Yes, it does.

      You seem to stick to the idea that the corpus of knowledge gathered through the scientific method is the same thing as the scientific method itself. The difference has already been explained by another poster rather more eloquently than I could. Religious people accept religious truths on faith, whereas those of a more scientific frame of mind accept scientific hypotheses on the basis that they rest upon evidence. They may accept that the evidence exists by trusting those in the scientific community to not pull the wool over their eyes, but this is not the same thing as accepting the hypotheses itself on faith.

      Actually since the 1960s science and philosophy have been divorced from each other, to the detriment of science. I am not equating science and religion, by the way. I am merely pointing out that since most people no longer have a solid understanding of philosophy, they fail to understand that what they propose to know scientifically, they don't actually know, but instead believe. That is because to know something, one must have first experienced it (that's philosophy), without that, we can only accept on faith (not religious faith) what has been told to us. Of course the more credible sources that tell us about it, the more we can rely on it, but without first hand experience, it will always be acceptance on faith not true knowledge (although the probability may be extremely high).

      Like it or not, that is the same mechanism involved with religious faith. An idea is passed done by those deemed to be knowledgeable or learned. The more credible the sources and the more voluminous the sources, the greater the reliance on it. However, without first hand experience, it is still acceptance on faith and not true knowledge.

      Think back to geometry class and doing proofs. Probably you were told various things, and then had to do the proofs yourself. Once you did them yourself, you had first hand knowledge and actually knew, for instance, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (in Euclidean geometry). But up until that point, you accepted that the statement was true, based on the testimony of the teacher. That is belief or faith.

      Or, take cold fusion, periodically, we hear of accounts of it occurring in a lab. That is testimony. Somebody repeats the experiment for them self and finds that it does not. That negates the first person's testimony. If they repeated it, then they had knowledge that the process worked and the rest of us would accept that the testimony was a little more credible. By the time it is repeated many times, we would accept it as highly credible, but it would still be acceptance and belief, not first hand knowledge.

      Belief does not lessen science, it is only a problem because we chose to ignore philosophy. If we emphasized philosophy as part of STEM in education, things would be much more balanced and it would be much more difficult for pseudo-science to exist. Why? Because people would understand what science is and is not and what they know and what they accept (or think they know).

      Put differently, faith is much broader than religious faith. If I write you a personal check at a garage sale, you are accepting on faith that the funds are available so that when you deposit the check you will be paid. That is the true meaning of faith - acceptance on the word of another. Without faith, we could not have science, because every scientist would have to repeat every experiment for themself to prove what they were currently wanting to prove. Faith is as essential to science as it is to religion and that is why it doesn't lessen science.

    41. Re:A projection of what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm not sure you can call this a belief system, because you can practice science without holding these beliefs. I'd rather call it a postulate system or an axiomatic system.
      Likewise, you can study theology --- or practice religion (in which case you'd be a hypocrite) --- without holding a specific belief system. However, you cannot actually have a religion without holding certain beliefs.
      Like theology and unlike religion, science does not require belief in its practice.

    42. Re:A projection of what? by VisceralLogic · · Score: 1

      What do you mean it was proven wrong? It never was, and it hasn't been yet. It probably can't be. (Well, except in the sense that Newtonian Mechanics was wrong.)

      Sure it was. We now understand the laws of gravity (to within a marginal percent, anyway). Orbiting bodies have orbital periods corresponding with their distance from the center body and the weight of the center body. The planets all orbit the sun, and the moon orbits the earth.

      --
      Stop! Dremel time!
  3. No idea what that means by Sigvatr · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have no idea what any of this stuff means, but I'm going to post it on my Facebook and claim that this is what I thought all along anyway.

    1. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny
    2. Re:No idea what that means by VibratoryDavid · · Score: 1

      I have no idea what any of this stuff means, but I'm going to post it on my Facebook and claim that this is what I thought all along anyway.

      We could be the best of friends

    3. Re:No idea what that means by PieEye · · Score: 4, Informative

      "Computer: end program."

      --
      ... in bed.
    4. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have no idea what any of this stuff means, but I'm going to post it on my Facebook and claim that this is what I thought all along anyway.

      Look above your head. See that floating green diamond? That means the brilliant idea you just had, wasn't yours. Wait for it to go away, then go piss in the corner. Everything will be fine.

    5. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OMG, the safety protocols have been disabled...

    6. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It means the universe is a roll of film flipping in front of a light to show a movie. Except that it's a step better than the 3D movie craze, it's a 3D that doesn't require fancy glasses or sitting in exactly one spot to watch.

      This is were the scientist asks if we can get off the film, the engineer starts plans to make a holographic 3D film to try it out, and the philosopher asks who is watching the film.

    7. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Ok, so when Riker was mackin' on the smokin' hot biddy in the red dress, lets say the two started knocking boots and he climaxed inside her. What happens to his seed when the program ends? Does the Holodeck recycle it for foodstuffs later, or does it just fall to the floor?

    8. Re:No idea what that means by CanHasDIY · · Score: 2, Funny

      It means that, when the Oracle told Neo, "there is no spoon," she was more correct than neither she nor the Jackson brothers could have possibly imagined.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    9. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Personally, I'd liken it more to The Big Goodbye, since our position (unless you know more than you're letting on) is closer to the holographic McNary, presented with technology far beyond his understanding, than the presumably "real" Barclay or even Moriarty, who understand the technology but do not recognize signs of it in their universe. Which is amusing, since Barclay's final question was intended to provoke this kind of reaction in audiences at the time, while McNary was intended to be more "alien" to viewers than the Enterprise crew.

    10. Re:No idea what that means by CreatureComfort · · Score: 3, Funny

      I just wanna sell popcorn.

      --
      "Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
      Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
    11. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oracle [...] the Jackson brothers

      They both made a lot of wheird crap, but neighter Larry Ellison nor the Jackson brothers had anything to to with the matrix...

    12. Re: No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think they beam it back into his balls.

    13. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Wesley has to mop it up.

    14. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's obviously beamed into the Capt.'s Earl Grey.

    15. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Ah, so it's because you're delusional. All these years I was wondering!

    16. Re:No idea what that means by Quasimodem · · Score: 1

      So who do I have to fook to get out of this lousy movie?

    17. Re: No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Anytime someone ejaculates in the holo deck a tribble is born. The only explanation of their exponential population growth.

    18. Re: No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OMG... Probably the funniest thing I've read on /. in a month! Thank you, AC!

    19. Re: No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think they beam it back into his balls.

      Is that called reenergizing?

    20. Re: No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      -Bean them back, Scotty!
      -Yack, I mean yes sir!

    21. Re:No idea what that means by uCallHimDrJ0NES · · Score: 1

      I'll bite. Who are the Jackson brothers?

      --
      Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
    22. Re:No idea what that means by OakDragon · · Score: 3, Funny

      You know.... Michael, Tito, the rest.

    23. Re:No idea what that means by Zynder · · Score: 1

      Michael, Jermaine, Tito, & that other one no one remembers

    24. Re:No idea what that means by fisted · · Score: 4, Informative

      except it's that bald kid who tells Neo that, not the Oracle

    25. Re: No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That would still be linear growth, unless the tribbles were... nvm.

    26. Re:No idea what that means by cayenne8 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm gonna wait till Sheldon confirms it on the Big Bang Theory.

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    27. Re:No idea what that means by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 1

      Michael, Jermaine, Tito, & that other one no one remembers

      Duh. Zeppo.

    28. Re:No idea what that means by CanHasDIY · · Score: 3, Funny

      except it's that bald kid who tells Neo that, not the Oracle

      Damn, my knowledge of decade-old, super cheesy sci-fi is flawed!

      I shall hang my head in shame.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    29. Re:No idea what that means by p00kiethebear · · Score: 4, Funny

      Ok, so when Riker was mackin' on the smokin' hot biddy in the red dress, lets say the two started knocking boots and he climaxed inside her. What happens to his seed when the program ends? Does the Holodeck recycle it for foodstuffs later, or does it just fall to the floor?

      It does fall to the floor. The holodeck Janitor cleans it up: http://www.somethingawful.com/news/blue-stripe-life-4/

      --
      The Blade Itself
    30. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      none of this means there is no spoon.

    31. Re:No idea what that means by fisted · · Score: 1

      Hm, it was worth an unsolicited reference before -- now it's ``decade-old super cheesy''

    32. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Holodeck Janitor handles it, of course.

    33. Re:No idea what that means by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 3, Funny

      "Computer: end program."

      Tea: Earl Grey, Hot.

      Didn't work, but there's still no way I'm wearing a red jumpsuit out of the house....

    34. Re:No idea what that means by Immerman · · Score: 2

      Exiting is easy, there's a million different options with varying levels of literary appeal. The only problem lies in that "you" is a character within the movie, who is presumably uncertain as to the existence of an actor performing the part, and/or the equivalence of said actor with "yourself". That being the case, intentionally hastening your inevitable exit has not become a popular sport.

      And may I just say, if you think the movie is lousy perhaps you're judging it by the wrong standards? Even a brilliant tragedy makes for a poor comedy. And after all you could at this moment be a pan-dimensional being immersed in a context-suppressing holographic reenactment of early 21st century life on the latest singularity-based gamestation. Or perhaps you're an NPC and the AI is just that good. Either way, the play's the thing.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    35. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      with his mouth.

    36. Re:No idea what that means by ArbitraryName · · Score: 1

      the Jackson brothers

      Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael?

    37. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ok, so when Riker was mackin' on the smokin' hot biddy in the red dress, lets say the two started knocking boots and he climaxed inside her. What happens to his seed when the program ends? Does the Holodeck recycle it for foodstuffs later, or does it just fall to the floor?

      http://www.somethingawful.com/news/blue-stripe-life-4/

    38. Re:No idea what that means by CanHasDIY · · Score: 4, Informative

      Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

      The first Matrix was damn good, the second one was cheesy, and the third one was just a big steaming pile. IMO.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    39. Re:No idea what that means by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      the Jackson brothers

      Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael?

      Nah - Andy, Hugh, and Bob.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    40. Re:No idea what that means by freeze128 · · Score: 1

      Remember the episode where Wesley was coming out of the Holodeck, and as Picard walked by, he got hit with a snowball?

      That wasn't snow.

    41. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's also the Wachovsky Brothers...

    42. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It happened in the first one. Where did the "super cheesy" thing come from?

    43. Re:No idea what that means by uCallHimDrJ0NES · · Score: 1

      The rest? Really? So, the Jackson bros are Michael, Tito, the Professor, and Mary Ann? Got it. Thanks!

      --
      Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
    44. Re:No idea what that means by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      "Computer: end program."

      Tea: Earl Grey, Hot.

      Didn't work, but there's still no way I'm wearing a red jumpsuit out of the house....

      Primitive technology,

      A sufficiently advanced system would recognize his voice and automatically choose his usual preference unless otherwise stated. In other words:

      "Tea."

    45. Re:No idea what that means by blue+trane · · Score: 1

      "Everybody wants to be a nigger, nobody wants to be a nigger" - Paul Mooney

    46. Re:No idea what that means by kaatochacha · · Score: 5, Informative

      They are brothers no more.

    47. Re:No idea what that means by Greyfox · · Score: 1

      Pretty sure I came up with the idea in the '80s one time when I was high. I'd have written it down, but I was high.

      --

      I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    48. Re:No idea what that means by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      He's referring o the Jackson Five, kid. A band of sibling children fifty years ago whose songs were constantly on the radio and TV and who made millions of dollars. One of them died last year, you might have heard of him, his name was Michael.

      Now, how far down this offtopic horse shit am I going to have to dig to find an on-topic comment? Preferably someone who can teach me something?

    49. Re: No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or, this could be how the Immaculate conception was done.

    50. Re:No idea what that means by uCallHimDrJ0NES · · Score: 2

      Wow, mcgrew. You called me "kid," after the Gilligan's Island theme song "and the rest" joke? How old are YOU, kid? 35? I bit on the Jackson bros reference because I was trying to figure out what the AC who made the Matrix joke was talking about when he said "the Jackson brothers". I assume he means the two bros who directed the Matrix, whose names I don't remember but I often call "The V.I. Warshowski Brothers." Because it's more fun than learning what their names are. But why of all the names to go to, he chose "Jackson", that part I still don't get. Anyway, back on topic, per your request. Holograms. Stop being one. I have! It's great. You guys are all look see-through to me now.

      --
      Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
    51. Re: No idea what that means by VTBlue · · Score: 1

      I actually wondered about this back when I was going through puberty.

    52. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It means that, when the Oracle told Neo, "there is no spoon," she was more correct than neither she nor the Jackson brothers could have possibly imagined.

      I'm not sure what the Jackson Five had to do with the Matrix, but it was the Wachowski Brothers who made the Matrix.

      Although now its more of the "Wachowski Family" considering Larry changed his name to Lana and his gender to female back in 2008.

    53. Re:No idea what that means by mjwx · · Score: 1

      "Computer: end program."

      Tea: Earl Grey, Hot.

      Didn't work, but there's still no way I'm wearing a red jumpsuit out of the house....

      Primitive technology,

      A sufficiently advanced system would recognize his voice and automatically choose his usual preference unless otherwise stated. In other words:

      "Tea."

      What if he likes more than one type of tea?

      It would be counter intuitive if the program didn't allow for options.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    54. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed; the Matrix was a good movie. Too bad they didn't make any sequels.

    55. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Latoya?

    56. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thank you so much.
      It's been a while since I've read that.

    57. Re:No idea what that means by mattack2 · · Score: 1

      One of them died last year

      Hey pops, time flies when you get older, huh?

      It was almost 4.5 years ago when he died, not "last year".

    58. Re:No idea what that means by shokk · · Score: 1

      Toyota.

      --
      "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
    59. Re:No idea what that means by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      [Crash! Wham! Ow! Ow!]

      Too bad, indeed.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    60. Re:No idea what that means by styrotech · · Score: 1

      Ha! In the real world we'd end up with the Nutrimatics Drinks Dispenser.

    61. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Simplest explanation to all this bull$h1t: We are unique and not unique at the same time. Too much people are making various proofs of the same thing. But no one is able to think further: "why we have such a property"...

    62. Re:No idea what that means by tragedy · · Score: 1

      Yes, primitive technology. Not like the advanced technology we have now with spell checkers and search engines and so forth anticipating what you want all the time. Why, it works so well it frequently leaves me wanting to scream and tear my hair out in delight.

    63. Re:No idea what that means by Artifakt · · Score: 1

      Great, you've just proved that Cptn. Picard only drinks Earl Grey when the Enterprise is having something exciting enough to make it into the documentaries happen. Sadly, we will never know what he drinks when being captain of the Enterprise settles into a boring routine.

      --
      Who is John Cabal?
    64. Re:No idea what that means by sg_oneill · · Score: 1

      Picard only drank earl grey. If I remember right one epiosode someone gave him some hippy herbal tea and he hated it. So the computer would not have trouble working out what sort of tea he meant.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    65. Re:No idea what that means by Artifakt · · Score: 1

      What's not to get?
      "Wachowski" - It's easy to see how that could be confused with "Jackson". All he had to do was shift his fingers one unit to the reft and one unit borwards on the six dimensional* holographic keyboard - happens all the time.

      *The three you probably haven't met are Borwards and Fackwards, Light and Reft, and Dup and Own.
       

      --
      Who is John Cabal?
    66. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The first Matrix was awesome. It's a pity they never made any sequels.

      LA LA LA LA LA

    67. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It means you, me, everyone are just a one of those hologram stickers you can sometimes get from a box of cereal for example.

    68. Re:No idea what that means by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      It probably gets recycled via the replicators. Waste material such as sewage, rubbish, dematerialized holodeck characters and the like is returned to stores for later use as raw material. Riker probably has itfor lunch the next day.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    69. Re:No idea what that means by xororand · · Score: 1

      Of course!
      Like putting too much air in a balloon!

    70. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Buddhists did a pretty good job.

      You're right. Scientists, philosophers, mathematicians have yet again proven that there is an abstract algebraic relationship between the universe and its observation.

      What does it mean? Buddhism's central tenet is that this relationship must be examined through meditation, and that it is simultaneously personal and universal. The understanding of the self in the structure. Obviously, this is unscientific, since the understanding cannot be communicated. I personally find this idea very appealing. Its ethical ramifications run deep.

      Which I why I'm a bit annoyed at the monkey wrench the private language argument throws in the works.

    71. Re:No idea what that means by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      "Hippy herbal tea."

      Earl Grey is a mixture of tea and bergamot. Which itself is an herb.

      Anyway, it's rather amusing that only one computer on the Enteprise can talk, just aside from the stupidity of the food synthesizer.

    72. Re:No idea what that means by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      Ha! In the real world we'd end up with the Nutrimatics Drinks Dispenser.

      And yes, something almost - but not quite - entirely unlike tea

    73. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ensign Smith on punishment detail gets to squeegee the holodeck.

    74. Re:No idea what that means by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      when Riker was mackin' on the smokin' hot biddy...What happens to his seed when the program ends? Does the Holodeck recycle it for foodstuffs later, or does it just fall to the floor?

      Now you know the recipe for Photon Torpedo s.

    75. Re:No idea what that means by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      I bit on the Jackson bros reference because I was trying to figure out what the AC who made the Matrix joke was talking about when he said "the Jackson brothers".

      1) Not an AC.

      B) Couldn't remember who came up with that movie, all I knew is it was some set of brothers, and Jackson is the first name that popped in my head. Could I have verified that? Yea, but that would require more effort than I feel a bad movie pun would warrant.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    76. Re:No idea what that means by doccus · · Score: 1

      It means we're al flat as pancakes ;-)

    77. Re:No idea what that means by doccus · · Score: 1

      "Computer: end program."

      Tea: Earl Grey, Hot.

      Didn't work, but there's still no way I'm wearing a red jumpsuit out of the house....

      Primitive technology,

      A sufficiently advanced system would recognize his voice and automatically choose his usual preference unless otherwise stated. In other words:

      "Tea."

      What if he likes more than one type of tea? It would be counter intuitive if the program didn't allow for options.

      Simple.. It would rad his brainwave poatterns to see if he wanted earl grey, orange pekoe, or sex on the beach...

    78. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If our world were just a pre-recorded movie, and we were simply being replayed. Us knowing about being a movie should be impossible, unless the recording is of another recording? Does that mean that our universe is pirated?

    79. Re:No idea what that means by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      Hey pops, time flies when you get older, huh?

      Yes it does! Just you wait...

    80. Re:No idea what that means by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      Wow, mcgrew. You called me "kid,"

      At least I didn't order you off my lawn.

    81. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "and the rest..." You make it sound like Gilligan's Isle.

    82. Re:No idea what that means by uCallHimDrJ0NES · · Score: 1

      Perfect! I'll tell the family to pack up the tent. Canned hash, I'm sorry I called you an AC. Stop cooling this room so efficiently, and people will stop making the mistake I'm sure.

      --
      Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
    83. Re:No idea what that means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They are brothers no more.

      In many popular cultures, and in all western cultures as an archaic trope, any grouping of siblings, however many sisters there are, that contains at least one brother, is referred to as "brothers." It's a man's world. And was even more so before.

  4. so does this mean.... by ganjadude · · Score: 1

    The matrix is real???

    --
    have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
    1. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It changes nothing since it's always been more probable that we're in a simulation than not. If there is only one real world and we can create a complete simulation of it, then we can run a second simulation of it. If there's two simulations and one real world, it's more likely you're in one of the simulations than in the real world.

      Personally, I'd rather be living on the event horizon of a 4D black hole instead of someone's hologram. Are these two theories mutually exclusive?

    2. Re:so does this mean.... by muphin · · Score: 1

      Does that mean,
      "Dimensions" are alternate simulations, like we do with super computers? parallel processing.

      --
      It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
    3. Re:so does this mean.... by Common+Joe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I read the FTA and I didn't get any proof that we were living in a simulation at all. The article basically says some physicists ran two simulations for a black hole -- one with quantum theory (single dimension) and the other with a (more traditional) 10-dimensional model. The results matched.

      Several take aways: 1) Great work by the physicists 2) I thought the standard models had eleven dimensions and not ten 3) I still don't know what they are talking about because this stuff is way beyond me 4) There is no mention about whether this proves one way or another that our universe is a hologram or a simulation.

      The FTA is throwing around the word hologram, but IMHO that is a bit a stretch. Or maybe I don't know the official scientific definition of a hologram.

    4. Re:so does this mean.... by Kielistic · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think it's more probable that you just have no idea what you're talking about.

    5. Re:so does this mean.... by Common+Joe · · Score: 1

      FTA = The friggin article.

      I don't feel that tired, but I think my comment speaks for itself. I need to go take me a one dimensional holo-nap or something.

    6. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It changes nothing since it's always been more probable that we're in a simulation than not. If there is only one real world and we can create a complete simulation of it, then we can run a second simulation of it. If there's two simulations and one real world, it's more likely you're in one of the simulations than in the real world.

      Personally, I'd rather be living on the event horizon of a 4D black hole instead of someone's hologram. Are these two theories mutually exclusive?

      You saying that we are "living" out someone's sick little game? Are they enjoying watching us in their sim environment? They really get a kick out of people posting what they ate for breakfast on Facebook and Twitter?

    7. Re:so does this mean.... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      I always thought hologram implied that a piece was a picture of the whole.

      The headline made me picture extrapolating the universe from a piece of cake like HHGTTG.

      --
      Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
    8. Re:so does this mean.... by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      I like that argument and generally support it, but there is no reason to believe this (simulated) universe's physics resemble in any way that in the "real super-universe".

      Our apparent inability to understand the physical basis for the subjective conscious experience, which logically must have a physical basis, being a real phenomenon, and the curiously bizarre speed limit (perhaps to prevent universal dominance of any one government or dictator?) both suggest "its the way it's been done for billions of years".

      If the physical substrate for our consciousness is the proverbial brain in a vat, that physics could be completely separate in kind from that which is shoved in our faces.

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    9. Re:so does this mean.... by Quasimodem · · Score: 1

      That is my go to supposition in almost every news story --- especially those involving science.

    10. Re:so does this mean.... by lgw · · Score: 5, Informative

      Eleven vs Ten dimensions is at the heart of the "hologram" thing. The universe as a hologram (nothing at all to do with a simulation) is a metaphor for how the math worked out in a very surprising way from two different directions.

      In the study of black holes, a block hole represents the maximum entropy is is possible to have in a given volume. That there is a maximum possible information needed to completely describe a volume of space. Surprisingly that limit grows with surface area, not volume. By analogy, this is like saying you could take a holographic recording of a volume at its surface, and completely reconstruct the volume from that data. But the "holographic universe" is just an analogy for the very odd result that all the information describing a volume of space "fits" in 2 dimensions. It's best not to read too much into that because the limit here is really quite high, the maximum possible information is on the order of the surface area of a sphere measured in plank-lengths - vastly more bits than is likely relevant to anything.

      Inspired by this work, but in completely unrelated theory, it was found that the 11-diminsional quantum model can be completely captured in a 10-diminsional model that includes gravity. The presence of gravity in the universe "flattens" the state needed to describe it by one dimension. This was to me a much more interesting result that the black hole result (because the numbers there were so high it wasn't really a limit at all). Qualitatively all this is not that surprising in glorious hindsight, because gravity does limit the possible ways to arrange matter in the universe: black holes mean any arrangement with too much too close together collapses the information needed to describe it into just a few numbers. How that translates into needing 1 less dimension in quantum mechanics is far beyond me.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    11. Re:so does this mean.... by pla · · Score: 2

      I read the FTA and I didn't get any proof that we were living in a simulation at all.

      Because it doesn't claim that. Hologram != Simulation.


      The FTA is throwing around the word hologram, but IMHO that is a bit a stretch. Or maybe I don't know the official scientific definition of a hologram.

      It just means that our universe seems to have more dimensions than it really does, for certain purposes. By analogy with a visual hologram, which looks 3d but all the depth information resides entirely in the interference patterns encoded in a 2d image.

      It doesn't have anything to do with a holodeck or the universe as a simulation or even really invalidate the laws of physics as we currently know them. At best, it might mean that someday (a long, long time away) we can find a way to cheat certain of those laws that exist only as emergent behavior from the actual underlying system.

    12. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The hologram thing they're talking about doesn't mean anything like the matrix,
      it is more like Plato's cave, where the physical world we see is only a projection of some deeper physics.
      While we don't know if this deeper thing actually exist as a physical reality, the mathematics seem too work out, meaning we can calculate things in that theory and then project the results to the theories we use to describe the world, when doing a direct calculation is very hard/impossible.
      So, while as a theory it might be a step in the direction of a theory of everything ,solving all those discrepancies between quantum field theory and Einstein's gravity, practically it's just a way of doing calculations.
      you might want to look up Ads/CFT for some more information.

    13. Re: so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Retards.

    14. Re:so does this mean.... by OakDragon · · Score: 5, Funny

      ...2) I thought the standard models had eleven dimensions and not ten ...

      Look, the standard model has these eleven- *CRASH* - Oy! I mean ten - TEN dimensions!

    15. Re:so does this mean.... by Moose-Alini · · Score: 1

      I don't see how living in a simulation would be any different than not. Its still our universe and you are still the same you that struggles and eventually dies. If the universe is a simulation, it is still real to us. I actually kinda think being in a simulation would add meaning to life.

    16. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "It just means that our universe seems to have more dimensions than it really does, for certain purposes. By analogy with a visual hologram, which looks 3d but all the depth information resides entirely in the interference patterns encoded in a 2d image.

      It doesn't have anything to do with a holodeck or the universe as a simulation or even really invalidate the laws of physics as we currently know them. At best, it might mean that someday (a long, long time away) we can find a way to cheat certain of those laws that exist only as emergent behavior from the actual underlying system."

      Why not just say that instead of using the word "hologram" which has a well established meaning?

    17. Re:so does this mean.... by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1

      it is more like Plato's cave, where the physical world we see is only a projection of some deeper physics.

      Might we even say a METAphysics?

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    18. Re:so does this mean.... by quarterbuck · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think you missed a bit there.
      Any simulation of the world will be as complex as the original. So if you build a full simulation of the real world, you'd double the information complexity of the world. So that wouldn't work.
      One thing that might work is if you simulate regions of the "world" just in time -ie the things you see are being simulated as you look for them. That ties that simulation to a Matrix like world - each person effectively has his own world and they can be independent of each other.
      Another possibility is that we are in a limited simulation - some have said that quantum theory shows the graininess of the simulation and that relativistic speed limits limit the size of the canvas on which the world is being painted (ie you only have to simulate as far as the edge of the canvas, nothing outside it affects whatever is inside).
      In either of these cases, you cannot (be guaranteed to be able to) run a simulation within a simulation.

      --
      http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
    19. Re:so does this mean.... by hermitdev · · Score: 1

      Or, do the dimensions come from running the simulation inside of a simulation inside of a simulation, etc. until appropriate dimensional state is reached?

    20. Re:so does this mean.... by quarterbuck · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A very crude analogy would be a Fourier transform. If you take a simple wave it is very complicated to describe it in time domain (lots of terms mathematically), but it has a simple mathematical expression in frequency domain with just a single term.
      The physicists have figured out how to simplify the maths. This transformation also has a physical interpretation which is best explained as a hologram. A hologram has information from 3 dimensions scrunched into 2 dimensions, ie when you look at a hologram, it appears to have depth. In a common hologram sticker, that information is encoded in polarization. In the same manner, they seem to say information in a 11 Dimensional world can be scrunched into lesser number of dimensions. Hence the analogy.

      --
      http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
    21. Re:so does this mean.... by geekoid · · Score: 1

      no.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    22. Re:so does this mean.... by Immerman · · Score: 5, Funny

      Why do you automatically assume that the game is someone else's? They've made some huge advances in context-suppression in the latest generation holosims - you almost totally believe that the simulation is the whole of your existence and can, among other things, truly experience the wonder and horror of being a corporeal human in the early 21st century (one of the most popular scenarios, just look at the in-game population!)

      Oh, wait, I'm not supposed to discuss such things on the in-game forums. Forget I said anything.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    23. Re:so does this mean.... by Oligonicella · · Score: 2

      It changes nothing since it's always been more probable that we're in a simulation than not.

      Not in the least.

      If there is only one real world and we can create a complete simulation of it

      That's why. Parlor thoughts only. You cannot fit a complete description of reality in said reality. Recursion.

    24. Re:so does this mean.... by nurb432 · · Score: 1

      No.

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    25. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well done, Sir! Nice History of the World Part I reference. :-)

    26. Re:so does this mean.... by Daetrin · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hey, maybe _your_ universe only has ten dimensions, but _my_ universe goes to eleven!

      --
      This Space Intentionally Left Blank
    27. Re:so does this mean.... by sjames · · Score: 1

      It would be hologram like because it encodes N dimensions within N dimensions.

      It's nothing like proof of the actual state of things, but is proof that such a holographic theory COULD be correct.

    28. Re:so does this mean.... by blue+trane · · Score: 1

      In an infinite universe, everything will happen.

    29. Re:so does this mean.... by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      Any simulation of the world will be as complex as the original.

      Utter nonsense. Do you think that computer simulations of atomic blasts model every subatomic particle in the blast area? Do you think weather simulations model every molecule in the Earth's atmosphere?

    30. Re:so does this mean.... by Kielistic · · Score: 1

      That statement, although oft repeater, is simplified so much that it is pretty much false.

    31. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So this means if a tree falls in the forest and no one was listening, it wouldn't be simulated and therefore would not make a sound. That was easy...

    32. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Personally, I'd rather be living on the event horizon of a 4D black hole instead of someone's hologram. Are these two theories mutually exclusive?

      Well, according to the physics we know, we're living inside the event horizon of a massive black hole (the observable universe)

    33. Re:so does this mean.... by blue+trane · · Score: 1

      False from your limited perspective. True from other frames of reference.

    34. Re:so does this mean.... by Prune · · Score: 2

      >That there is a maximum possible information needed to completely describe a volume of space. Surprisingly that limit grows with surface area, not volume.

      This is equivalent to the Bekenstein bound, where the maximum entropy/information density is proportional to the radius and mass/energy. In the extreme case, for the latter substitute the Schwarszchild radius for that mass/energy, giving a formula proportional to the square of the radius--i.e. surface area, as you wrote.

      > It's best not to read too much into that because the limit here is really quite high....[11D to 10D reduction] much more interesting result that the black hole result

      I suggest otherwise. A finite maximum number of quantum states in any finitely bounded region of space implies that any physical system with a finite extent can always be simulated by a nondeterministic linearly bounded automaton, an abstract model of computation that is strictly less powerful than a Turing machine. So no super-Turing machines, no noncomputable information processing/thinking, no arbitraty precision real numbers--all of these things are unphysical. Unless you're a dualist and don't believe that mind is what the brain does, this physical constraint means that our minds are ultimately computational, because their physical implementation is computational, and that any finite brain can ultimately have only a finite number of different thoughts. It also means that halting problems and Godelian limits exist for our minds just as they exist for our electronic computers.

      --
      "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
    35. Re:so does this mean.... by HiThere · · Score: 2

      Naa. A much easier answer is that the simulation of the mind has only a limited amount of introspection capability.

      Actually, that's true irrespective of whether the apparent physical universe has "grounded" existence. You decide whether to move your fingers, and how, before you are aware of the action. My theory is that consciousness evolved out of a need to serialize experiences in order to index them for storage and retrieval. The actual physical universe (whether or not it's a simulation) is massively parallel WRT consciousness. What we CAN be aware of is only a fraction of what we physically experience. So the universe that we experience is guaranteed to be a simulation, irrespective of whether the containing physical universe is itself a simulation.

      The other alternative is Solipsism, which strikes me as a rather useless belief, even if it *IS* consistent with all available evidence.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    36. Re:so does this mean.... by Kielistic · · Score: 1

      Well it might be true if in your frame of reference "everything will happen" means "somethings might happen but definitely not everything". In any meaningful "frame of reference" to us "everything" will not happen.

    37. Re:so does this mean.... by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Was there ever any serious doubt that the halting problem and Godelian limits applied to minds?

      I've occasionally run across people who seemed to think so, but I always thought they were being unreasonable.

      OTOH, this may also imply that there is no way to do FTL, that wormholes will not be stabilizable, etc. And it seems as if it would put strict bounds on how powerful quantum computer algorithms could be.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    38. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One of the most insightful yet simplest comment I read on slashdot. Well written sir

    39. Re:so does this mean.... by Myria · · Score: 1

      So this means if a tree falls in the forest and no one was listening, it wouldn't be simulated and therefore would not make a sound. That was easy...

      So long as it is provably impossible for anyone to feel or notice the effects of that sound for all of eternity, yes, a simulation could get away with not simulating it. Provable impossibility in our Universe would be something happening outside the light cone of the simulated area.

      --
      "Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
    40. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Brief history of time, by Stephen Hawking explains it pretty simply. Page 180ish.

    41. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thank you very much. That said, when I said "simple wave" in the first line, "a single sine wave" may have been clearer.

      (Posting anon, logged in on a different computer)

    42. Re:so does this mean.... by Will.Woodhull · · Score: 1

      It's simulations all the way down.

      She called them "turtles", but that's just a semantic convenience.

      --
      Will
    43. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      the fourier transform is fundamental, not crude at all

    44. Re:so does this mean.... by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      So what you're saying is that there is not some alternate universe in which I ended up with a Hollywood starlet? Man, that just ruins my whole outlook on the multiverse.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    45. Re:so does this mean.... by bondsbw · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Then again, all that really has to be simulated is each person's sensory perception.

      Who is to say that the water in the oceans is actually made of H2O and NaCL and all kinds of microbes and other chemicals? One just needs to be convinced that any personal measurement is consistent within their universe (such as "seeing" light through a microscope, or "seeing" data on a screen connected to a spectrometer or other analysis device).

      Playing Halo doesn't require that every tree leaf on the map is rendered always, but when at least one player zooms in through their scope they should see those leaves.

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
    46. Re:so does this mean.... by Prune · · Score: 2

      Penrose is one of the most prominent respected scientists to propose noncomputable physics (see his "The Emperor's New Mind" and "Shadows of the Mind"), but his arguments were refuted by various experts, from physicists to logicians (see, for example, "A Refutation of Penrose's Godelian Case Against Artificial Intelligence"). He seemed to do it without any evidence, really, and claimed that quantum mechanics must be wrong since it's computable (as is, by the way, quantum field theory).

      There were other related arguments around the same time bearing upon this. One had to do with things such as a proposal that artificial neural networks can be super-turing if the weights at nodes could be arbitrary precision real numbers--something clearly excluded by the Bekenstein bound. Yet another one was the observation that a turing machine modified to have continued interaction with its environment, rather than just starting with input and ending with output, can be super-turing. However, this argument is akin to a slight of hand, because it's based on a misleading definition of what the information processing system is, by excluding part of it--the interacting environment in question. If that environment is finite (and it is limited by the system's light cone, unless you believe superluminal communication speed is possible), then the combined system is still sub-turing: a non-deterministic LBA.

      So are human minds subject to the same theoretical limits that apply to finite computers? It certainly appears that way, according to our current understanding of physics. Of course, it may be that this will be upturned in the future by the discovery of new, noncomputational physics, and, of course, not all philosophical worldviews align with physicalism.

      As for your comment on how powerful quantum computer algorithms can be, we already have a pretty good idea that they're not all that powerful--they're just more efficient (and, specifically, polynomially more efficient); see the computational complexity classes defined for them, like BQP etc. http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.3401

      --
      "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
    47. Re:so does this mean.... by blue+trane · · Score: 1

      Frames of reference are strange though. To Ptolemy, that the earth didn't move was the only meaningful frame of reference. How can you say that what is not meaningful, in your opinion, today, will not be so, or is not so right now if you abandon your assumptions (that orbits had to be circles, in the analogy to epicycle theory, for example)? Was the sun really orbiting the earth, because that was the meaningful frame of reference at the time? In the same way, is your "meaningful" frame of reference preventing you from seeing evidence that everything is or will happen?

    48. Re: so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I appreciate the halo analogy, but could we please stick to cars

    49. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No. No, we might not.

    50. Re:so does this mean.... by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 1

      Quite the contrary. In every alternate universe you ended up with a Hollywood starlet. it's just in this one that you suck really, really hard.

      Seriously, though, I thought we already knew that you could perfectly describe the contents of a black hole because entropy can never decrease / information can never be destroyed. I thought this information was all accumulated at the event horizon. /Lay man.

      --
      Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
    51. Re:so does this mean.... by Fr33z0r · · Score: 1

      You cannot fit a complete description of reality in said reality.

      But you don't need to describe reality to the extent that it can trick those outside the simulation, it only needs to be complex enough to fool the AI.

    52. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Its "hologram" right now, until this guy secures some additional funding from old rich people who love the buzzword, then he can relabel it for what it really is.

    53. Re:so does this mean.... by Kielistic · · Score: 1

      This is why your statement and opinion is pointless. The Earth was never motionless no matter what someone believed or used as a simplification. That has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of multi-dimensional theory. Ptolemy never stood on a motionless Earth- not in this dimension or in any theoretical other dimension. There are no physical means to achieve that state. Physics doesn't give a shit what you believe. The fact that you have no idea what these words mean doesn't mean "everything will happen".

    54. Re:so does this mean.... by lannocc · · Score: 1

      Thank you for this explanation! I am by no means a physicist but I continue to follow what I can. As a programmer, one concept I like to explore is that any perceived loss of entropy in our universe could simply be a tighter compaction of information with redundancy removed and described by a smaller process outside of our boundaries, much like a document is compressed by a compression algorithm. When you look at the resulting (compressed) output you see less information (bits) and what appears to be a random distribution or noise. Studies like this and your explanation help me to align my layman conjectures with the more rigorous theories and focused terminology used by those in the field. One of these days I really do hope I get to dig into the math on problems like these!

    55. Re:so does this mean.... by lgw · · Score: 1

      Why would it surprise anyone that out minds are strictly computational, as described by the laws of physics? If you believe a portion of thought is provided by an invisible sky friend, then thinking isn't limited by the laws of physics anyhow. If not, is this the remaining victory for the Copernican assumption - that our minds are not special?

      Most human thought could be simulated by very simple state machines anyhow, in my experience.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    56. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Did you mean Laplace transform? Anyway, good point.

    57. Re:so does this mean.... by Cederic · · Score: 1

      I concede. You may be talking simple common sense or you may be channeling a random text generator and.. I can't tell which.

      A finite maximum number of quantum states in any finitely bounded region of space implies that any physical system with a finite extent can always be simulated by a nondeterministic linearly bounded automaton, an abstract model of computation that is strictly less powerful than a Turing machine.

      So if there's a limited set out possible outcomes, a non-deterministic system can simulate them? I'm not sure that follows.

    58. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      > I always thought hologram implied that a piece was a picture of the whole.

      That's a misconception about holograms, and I really wish it would go away.

      The thing about a hologram is that it's like a photograph, except it captures an interference pattern rather than a focused image. So a piece of a hologram contains just part of the information, just as a piece of a photograph only contains part of the whole.

      But when you look at a piece of a hologram, you see what looks like the whole image, but it's only a subset of viewing angles of the whole. There's no infinite fractal self-folding magic in a hologram, that's something New Age Woo Gurus came up with.

    59. Re:so does this mean.... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      I actually thought you lost fidelity, and not angles, I didn't think it was magic, I just thought that's where the name came from.

      --
      Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
    60. Re:so does this mean.... by blue+trane · · Score: 1

      The point is, the feeling that Ptolemy was standing on a motionless earth was as real to you as the idea that everything can't happen.How can you disprove block time, the theory that everything is happening at once? And if the "block" (the universe) is infinite, then somewhere in there the Earth can be standing still, and Ptolemy standing on it? Or there could be an infinity of multiverses, at least one of which has different "laws" of physics in which Ptolemy is standing on a motionless earth. There are infinite possibilities for everything to happen.

      Your statement: "There are no physical means to achieve that state." reminds me of the reasoning used by the Ancient Greeks to "disprove" Aristarchus's theory of a heliocentric solar system: "If the earth moves around the sun, there will be parallax motion of the stars. We do not observe parallax motion of the stars. Therefore, the earth doesn't move around the sun." But the "meaningful" frame of reference that was so real to them changed. In the same way, your "meaningful" frame of reference will not be so real to others. Aristarchus's frame of reference is now more real to you; but in his time, would you have been arguing against him because your frame of reference conformed to the social realities?

      So in the future (not too distant, I bet), for example, we could construct a simulation of a motionless earth and put a virtual Ptolemy on it, and he would be right that the earth didn't move, from his frame of reference. And from another frame of reference, he'd be wrong. But from another even larger than that one, he'd be right. And so on. Everything is true, and everything is not true.

    61. Re:so does this mean.... by entrigant · · Score: 1

      TFA discusses whether or not the universe is holographic not if it's simulated.

    62. Re:so does this mean.... by metaforest · · Score: 1

      It just means that our universe seems to have more dimensions than it really does, for certain purposes. By analogy with a visual hologram, which looks 3d but all the depth information resides entirely in the interference patterns encoded in a 2d image.

      Sorry, holograms are not encoded in a simple 2D plane. This is because the film emulsion is not a mathematical plane, but a planar volume with more than enough height to encode the 3D interference pattern passing through the emulsion as well as the 2D polarization field relative to the projection plane. From that one gets 5 dimensions: 3 of position and 2 of polarization angle (normal to the projection plane) for every element of the hologram. And that is just a simple static hologram.

    63. Re:so does this mean.... by pla · · Score: 1

      Sorry, holograms are not encoded in a simple 2D plane.

      We have people mistaking TFA as suggesting we live in a Star Trek holodeck. Bogging the explanation down with even more technical details didn't really seem like the best approach to making a simple analogy most folks could understand. :)

      In the interest of accuracy, however, I thank you for clarifying that point.

    64. Re:so does this mean.... by metaforest · · Score: 1

      Gracias. I too was trying to help the /. noobs understand how dimensions are used in physics by explaining how many dimensions are encoded in a simple hologram. Your post gave me an oprning to address that.

    65. Re:so does this mean.... by metaforest · · Score: 1

      opening that is. More advanced holography use a few more dimensions to encode animated transitions and visually complete "walk around" holographs. These advanced holographs use cylindrical or spherical surface geometry to reproduce the images. The people that do this for a living know far more about light that most of us ever will :)

    66. Re:so does this mean.... by metaforest · · Score: 1

      Pro tip: You can't do holography with your Dad's gas HeNe laser ripped out of an old LVD player, because it has 'random dynamic' polarization. The laser must have fixed polarization. Fixed polarization requires lasers noobs cannot afford to buy.

    67. Re:so does this mean.... by Prune · · Score: 1

      >So if there's a limited set out possible outcomes, a non-deterministic system can simulate them? I'm not sure that follows.

      Finiteness and non-determinism are completely separate issues. Let me elaborate on these two for a bit.

      I specified a non-deterministic LBA because what's known as "The First LBA problem" is still outstanding--that is, whether the class of problems solvable by a non-deterministic LBA is the same as its deterministic counterpart. It may be possible that the non-deterministic LBA is more powerful. And, as QM is non-deterministic, if they are indeed different in power, it may take a non-deterministic LBA to be able to simulate any possible finite physical system in a universe that is quantum in nature, such as ours.

      The finiteness issue is not addressed by non-determinism; it's addressed by using an abstract model of computation that is strictly more powerful than LBAs: Turing machines. They are just like LBAs, except that they have unlimited memory. It's worth noting here that for TMs it's been shown that non-deterministic TMs are exactly as powerful as deterministic ones. All that non-determinism adds for TMs is an increase in efficiency for some classes of problems.
      To physically realize a universal TM, you'd need to make sure it can have an arbitrarily large amount of memory, to cover all possible information processing that a TM can do. This is not possible in our universe, since due to quantum uncertainty, as your TM's extent in either time or space goes to infinity, the probability that a quantum fluctuation will screw up its processing goes to 1 (certainty). Not to mention other issues such as running out of reachable usable energy gradient to power arbitrarily long information processing due to accelerating expansion of the universe (which limits the matter-energy that can ever be within our Hubble volume).

      The infinity of a TM's infinite memory is countable infinity; i.e. akin to the set of integers, or other countable sets. However, another type of infinity is uncountable, such as the set of real numbers. In a finite interval, such as from 0 to 1, there are still infinitely many real numbers. Uncountable infinites were proved to be strictly larger in a mathematical sense than countable ones, by Cantor's famous diagonalization argument. If real numbers were physically realizable, you could have an entity that is super-Turing in information processing power. But this is exactly what the Bekenstein bound rules out, by limiting the number of states in a finite expanse.

      --
      "Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
    68. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perhaps "viewing angles" isn't the best way to put it, since it depends on how you expose the hologram. I recall seeing a demonstration with a "rotating" hologram that was exposed while the subject was in motion, but with a still subject, the image in the smaller piece will look pretty much the same - you just see less of the scene.

      The point is, a hologram captures an information about a physical phenomenon in a physical space. When you reduce the size of that space, you reduce the amount of information. There's no possible way a smaller piece can contain the *whole* image.

      Here's a good demonstration video of how it looks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8OEiTe8_Dc

      Notice that the image you see in the smaller pieces is *not* identical to what you see in the whole!

    69. Re:so does this mean.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Stop messing with my mind.

    70. Re:so does this mean.... by haruchai · · Score: 1

      "it's just in this one that you suck really, really hard" - does that mean that in this universe, he's the starlet?

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
  5. Pan-dimensional beings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    who appear to us as mice

  6. Does this Mean that String Theory... by occasional_dabbler · · Score: 2

    ...is no longer not even wrong ?

    --
    "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
    1. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      There's lots of good debate about string theory, but that blog is just shallow bitterness. String theory is more like calculus than an actual model. It is used to create models, which can be tested. Calculus can be used to create models which are right and models which are wrong too, but no one goes around saying "calculus isn't science", because pedantic silliness.

    2. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by gstoddart · · Score: 0

      I am not a physicist, but my layman's understanding of string theory is that most physicist don't understand what it is, there's a bunch of different variations on it, and you could never prove that it was right or wrong.

      Every time someone has tried to explain it to me, I'm left with the distinct impression it's voodoo that is not something you could falsify or verify.

      To me, a simulation suggesting we could be a hologram is self serving, and bears no actual relation to the real world.

      I'm probably entirely wrong on this, but I tend to assume that any model which says our universe is a simulation (or whatever) is just gibberish and cute math tricks.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by marcello_dl · · Score: 1

      To me it doesn't change anything. This is about possible details of implementation of the universe, very useful scientifically, not so much philosophically.

      You have a black box with I/O. You experience the output and can tweak the input. This piece of news says one can find a model that explains how the output behaves.
      You can ask yourself "is the black box containing the circuitry that implements my model"? But you have to stop there, as you still don't have access to the box. It could be the circuitry you imagined, it could be something completely different.

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    4. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by DaveV1.0 · · Score: 2

      No, it is still not even wrong, but we are closer to knowing if it could be right or wrong. This is not strong evidence, let alone proof, of string theory. This just gives it a way to be more compatible with relativity. The problem is that it could be just a good approximation of something else.

      --
      There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
    5. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Calculus doesn't go around claiming to have a 'theory of everything'. As a casual reader of 'Not Even Wrong' I don't believe that the author disputes the math mathematical techniques used in String Theory but many of the claims of SUSY and similar predictions which are continuously modified as their predictions are shown to be false. That mathematical techniques used in String Theory have some amount of merit as they have proven results, but they should not be included in String Theory any more then Laplace transforms should be included in quantum mechanics.

    6. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by Sarten-X · · Score: 5, Informative

      My layman's understanding is that string theory is what you get when physicists try to compromise.

      Problem is, we have two models of the universe. There's the model that describes gravity, and the model that describes everything else. Since these are mathematical models, it should be possible to have a single unified model that can describe both other models accurately under appropriate conditions, but the two models are different enough to make that difficult. Whatever that ultimate unified model is, it's probably something complex and hard to really understand fully.

      That's string theory. It's a physical description of the math that makes the models make sense together. We don't really know how to prove it's right or wrong, because we can't observe it directly. Since its inception, the math has required a few logical leaps and assumptions that are not quite rigorously proven true... yet. Depending on which of those assumptions are accepted at any particular time, there are indeed several variations and possible implications that can be inferred. This doesn't necessarily mean the idea is invalid, but just that more mathematical work (such as in TFA) is needed before we can really say we know what's going on.

      The terms "simulation" and "projection" are also used in an unusual sense here, as well. They refer to our observable universe being only the result of a system we can't observe directly, much like a projection on a screen or a simulation inside a computer. Ultimately, understanding the mechanism that's actually running the "simulation" could open the door to new phenomena in our universe that we haven't observed before.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    7. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, like most "new" things in science, it doesn't mean anything nor does it matter at all...

    8. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No, this addresses none of the issues raised by Woit. If these papers are correct, they would prove the equivalence of two kinds of theory, neither of which corresponds to the actual universe. It's very nice for string theory if these two kinds of theory turn out to be equivalent, but it has no bearing on what the correct theory of the actual universe is.

    9. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by geekoid · · Score: 1

      "I'm left with the distinct impression it's voodoo that is not something you could falsify or verify."

      It is possible to falsify a number of these theory, but just not technologically possible at the moment.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    10. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by Immerman · · Score: 1

      ...until it does.

      Quantum mechanics was just a silly newfangled concept until somebody used it to invent the transistor, a few decades later the technologies built upon just that one crude application of the theory is transforming several aspects of the human experience.

      Ditto for Germ Theory, Relativity (GPSes among others), and many others.

      Science in general, and theoretical physics especially, is the art of understanding the fundamental rules of the game. To most people most of those are (directly) irrelevant, but it paves the way for others to figure out how to game the system in new and interesting ways, and *that* can have far-reaching implications.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    11. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by mbone · · Score: 1

      No, it is still not even wrong, but we are closer to knowing if it could be right or wrong. This is not strong evidence, let alone proof, of string theory. This just gives it a way to be more compatible with relativity. The problem is that it could be just a good approximation of something else.

      It's not even that good. It deals with the AdS/CFT correspondence. The "AdS" in that acronym stands for "Anti-de Sitter" space, i.e., a spacetime with a negative cosmological constant. Observation shows that we actually live in a universe with a positive cosmological constant, so the compatibility is with the wrong relativity.

    12. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by mbone · · Score: 1

      Mod this parent up.

    13. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by Charliemopps · · Score: 1

      This isn't even really string theory. It's more of a "if string theory is real, then this might be how it works" But the evidence coming out of the LHC lately has been making string theory less and less likely which is really upsetting some physicist because it was are most elegant model to date and physicist love elegant models. It's not been ruled out yet, but it has some pretty big hurdles to jump if it's still going to be a contender.

    14. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by Boronx · · Score: 1

      Calculus isn't science.

    15. Re:Does this Mean that String Theory... by Sarius64 · · Score: 1

      The only thing it might begin to change for me is leading to an understanding of M-theory sequence where we can get to other sections of the universe quickly (FTL?). Other than that, I don't see a ready use. But, then again, it took Thomas Crapper to get western society to flush the toilet.

  7. Worse news is sure to follow. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Funny
    Not only is the universe a hologram, it is actually contained inside R2D2.

    Then they will tell you it is recursive too.

    But it happened long time ago and in a galaxy far away.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:Worse news is sure to follow. by BenSchuarmer · · Score: 4, Funny

      Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.

    2. Re:Worse news is sure to follow. by Jason+Levine · · Score: 1

      No worse news would be that the universe is a hologram... and that the hologram is being watched by Jar-Jar Binks and our Universe-Simulation will stop if he breaks the hologram player. So as long as Jar-Jar Binks isn't clumsy, we're ok.

      --
      My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
    3. Re:Worse news is sure to follow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So Déjà vu is just George Lucas remaking/re-cutting/re-releasing Star Wars again.

    4. Re:Worse news is sure to follow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    5. Re:Worse news is sure to follow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And all this time I thought it was locker C18.

    6. Re:Worse news is sure to follow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Glory and Honor to Senator Binks of Naboo!

  8. Re:wow by ganjadude · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hate to tell you but not all scientists are doctors, and also cancer is not the only issue that is affecting us today. The more we understand about the universe, the more we understand about ourselves.

    In other words, what are YOU doing to cure cancer since you think that "scientists" should focus on cancer instead of XX.

    --
    have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
  9. In a hologram... by stkpogo · · Score: 1

    There's no room for physicists.

  10. Re:wow by peon_a-z,A-Z,0-9$_+! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    why oh why are scientists wasting time on this? one step at at time, for now figure out how to cure cancer before worrying about the big picture. you must unzip your pants before worrying about how much piss comes out

    Really???? If all "scientists" thought like that then we wouldn't be in a position to even KNOW what *cancer* is. We'd be stuck on a problem prior to that hundreds of years ago.

    Science is all about looking far and wide for answers. Sometimes things are immediately applicable to your specific problem/condition/annoyance/life, but sometimes they aren't.

    Applied science / engineering is more about solutions to your specific problem. Perhaps you can go ask the bio-medical engineers to hurry it up, but leave the scientists alone!

  11. Re:wow by Spy+Handler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    why are you wasting time reading Slashdot? Millions of children are dying in Africa as we speak. You must go help them before worrying about anything else.

  12. Flat like a shell. by PaddyM · · Score: 2

    It's turtles all the way down to turtle prime which is a comic book.

    1. Re:Flat like a shell. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Conveniently, the turtles are too small to observe in an experiment.

    2. Re:Flat like a shell. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      PARROTRON WILL CRACK THE SHELL OF TURTLE PRIME LIKE AN EGG!

      stupid caps filter stupid caps filter stupid caps filter stupid caps filter stupid caps filter

    3. Re:Flat like a shell. by hguorbray · · Score: 1

      guess that means that we are actually in flatland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

      -I'm just sayin'

    4. Re: Flat like a shell. by jd2112 · · Score: 1

      No, They are ninja turtles. And of course ninjas are experts in stealth. So we can assume that because no turtles were observed it is because they were hidden. Next time be sure to have plenty of pizza on hand and your results may be different.

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
    5. Re:Flat like a shell. by Jason+Levine · · Score: 2

      Are these "turtles all the way down", teen-aged, mutated, and trained in the art of ninjitsu by any chance?

      --
      My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
    6. Re: Flat like a shell. by Cryacin · · Score: 1

      Nah, turtles all the way down, then you hit a tortoise and a SVN repository

      --
      Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    7. Re:Flat like a shell. by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      No. But they can be programmed in Logo.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    8. Re:Flat like a shell. by GonzoPhysicist · · Score: 1

      Does turtle prime disrupt the whole stack with a mighty smack of its flipper?

      --
      horror vacui
  13. Oh, it's a lot older than that. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 3, Interesting
    1. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by chemical55 · · Score: 1

      and not so much older http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_a_Wire

    2. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by DexterIsADog · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Oh, nonsense. The Matrix is not an accurate description of this theory, and Plato's metaphor is only coincidentally similar in outline to it.

      Your point is like people who say, "the Old Testament forbids the eating of shellfish like shrimp, and we know now that shrimp is high in cholesterol, so that book is an excellent source of dietary wisdom."

    3. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by mrbester · · Score: 1

      Except that shrimp are high in "good" cholesterol...

      --
      "Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
    4. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by PRMan · · Score: 1

      Actually, washing shellfish in fresh water rivers was the leading cause of the spread of cholera.

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
    5. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by DexterIsADog · · Score: 1

      Actually, "Shrimp contains so little fat of any kind that it will have almost no effect on your cholesterol levels" Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/450300-does-shrimp-contain-good-or-bad-cholesterol/#ixzz2nDByRn8F The point, however, was what people claim with no underlying science.

    6. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by blue+trane · · Score: 1

      And yet, in the Major Depression in the Population MOOC, we had a slide showing how often in history treatment precedes a scientific understanding of the cause of a disease: http://subbot.org/coursera/pmhdepression/prevention_vs_etiology.png

    7. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by DexterIsADog · · Score: 2

      Yeah, that's perception bias. Compare the nonsensical treatments, like bloodletting, and you'll see they vastly outnumber the ones that coincidentally resemble an actual treatment based on science.

      Remember, that "course" you took was free, and you know you get what you pay for.

    8. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by blue+trane · · Score: 2

      Have you actually done a comparison, or are you yourself showing perception bias?

    9. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by HiThere · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There WERE a lot of REALLY STUPID ideas and health practices. But the worst ones didn't adversely affect the practitioners. There was a lot of "evolution" going on before there were reasonable models, where people would come up with ideas almost at random, and the ones that killed (or adversely affected) their practitioners didn't tend to get transmitted on. But high status people could adopt practices that were frequently lethal to low status people with very little adverse affect, and because they were high status the ideas would tend to persist.

      Consider, e.g., the doctors who used to pride themselves on not washing their hands. For that matter, Aristotle decided that women had fewer teeth than men, and this was accepted as truth up through, I think, the 1500's. It didn't have much bad effect, but it's an example of high status individual and a totally arbitrary idea.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    10. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by DexterIsADog · · Score: 1

      Aw, sorry I made you defensive by making fun of your "course". Take a step up - use Wikipedia.

    11. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by blue+trane · · Score: 1

      Sounds like someone's suffering from cognitive dissonance. Take cholera, prevention preceded scientific identification of the cause. Snow identified a pump that was associated with the disease outbreak in London in 1849; but an agent wasn't identified for another 45 years.

      Ancient Jain texts prescribe straining or boiling water, because of water bodies that couldn't be seen, millenia before the microscope.

    12. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by brunnegd · · Score: 1

      The bible is full of information that was there for health reasons, such as shellfish and pork. That have become dogma for several religions. And in today's world, make no sense.

    13. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by jfengel · · Score: 1

      Actually, I was given bloodletting for a while as a treatment for a rare blood condition (hemochromatosis). It came in the form of blood donations. Obviously this is completely different from the "bleed them until they faint and figure it's progress because they've stopped screaming" kind of bloodletting, but I found it deeply ironic.

    14. Re:Oh, it's a lot older than that. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, nonsense. The Matrix is not an accurate description of this theory, and Plato's metaphor is only coincidentally similar in outline to it.

      Your point is like people who say, "the Old Testament forbids the eating of shellfish like shrimp, and we know now that shrimp is high in cholesterol, so that book is an excellent source of dietary wisdom."

      And plot twist: all modern research points to that cholesterol is benefitial, not harmful.

  14. 2 D projection? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So the flat earth society is right?

    1. Re:2 D projection? by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      No, because the projection is on the inside of the hollow earth. ;-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  15. On Other Dimensions by SumDog · · Score: 4, Informative

    A lot of people might find this a little hokey, especially coming from the journal Nature. The biggest thing to overcome is science fictions deception of other dimensions. A dimension is just another direction. We know about the six directions we can currently move in (3 dimensions) plus time (which we always move forward through at a constant rate; you can slow down how fast you move through time relative to everything else, but it's not noticeable unless you can afford a very very fast vehicle). Here's a great explanation of extra dimensions:

    http://www.phdcomics.com/tv/#010

    The other "Things explained" videos are also really good for understanding more complex physics concepts.

    1. Re:On Other Dimensions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I can move in an infinite* number of directions, but in 3D space I can put in one point only 3 lines which are perpendicular to each other.

      If we have more dimensions, we just replace the word "perpendicular" with "orthogonal".

      --
      * Or a very very high number if space is finite & discrete.

    2. Re:On Other Dimensions by peon_a-z,A-Z,0-9$_+! · · Score: 1

      WOOOSH

    3. Re:On Other Dimensions by Pro923 · · Score: 0

      I've often considered that there are more than just 3 (directional) dimensions in space. Gravity has the tendency to pull matter into as few dimensions as it can. Large balls of matter (planets/stars) are spherical (or really as much of a 1-dimensional point as is allowed by the inability for matter to occupy the same space). Solar systems and galaxies are eventually (more or less) 2 dimensional. Yes there are spherical galaxies, but "you're not thinking 4'th dimensionally" - they won't be that way eventually. The universe itself may have been many dimensions for some time after the big bang, but gravity has pulled most of the matter into the same 3 dimensions. It's possible that the universe is the analogous equivalent of a warped record - entire galaxies unseen to us because the light emitted by the stars aren't in the same 4'th dimension plane as our 3 dimensional eyes. Cosmic rays - pieces of matter that come at us from high speeds far away - could be oscillating back and forth through our plane, which would explain how they can pass through matter (they don't pass through our matter - they go around it). A lot of interesting ideas can be more easily realized if you reduce the number of dimensions. Pretend that we're 2 dimensional beings living on a 2 dimensional plane - with 2 dimensional light sources (sun). Anything slightly above or below that plane would be invisible to us - even though it's gravity would have an effect. We would really have no way to access these other physical directions - since our limbs and anything else that we have access to can only produce momentum in our 2 dimensions. Think about (I haven't been able to get this one) - if you were such a 2 dimensional being, how could you move yourself or some thing in that 3'rd dimension? What would you see?

    4. Re:On Other Dimensions by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      time (which we always move forward through at a constant rate

      I think of it as: we always move through spacetime at a constant rate - you can change the direction of your path relative to anything else, which leads to time dilation as you do swap motion through (another relatively moving observer's) time for motion through (another relatively moving observer's) space. Except time is inverted and wibbly wobbly and there is stuff.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    5. Re:On Other Dimensions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well if that's a WHOOSH, you can post one for me too cause I obviously don't get the joke. Hell, I didn't even know it was a joke.

    6. Re:On Other Dimensions by loneDreamer · · Score: 2

      Can you make the parallel with the 7D experience I get at the cinema? The fact that I'm still missing 3 or 4 dimensions pisses me off!

      The universe: it goes all the way to 11! ...but you really only need 10 ;-)

    7. Re:On Other Dimensions by hey! · · Score: 1

      plus time (which we always move forward through at a constant rate...

      This is a meaningless assertion. What units would you use to describe the "rate" or "time" flow? Images like "moving through time" or "time flowing" implicitly assume an independent time-like dimension.

      In reality what all these analogies characterize is not time, but things we might use as a clock. The passage of a water molecule down a clear, straight section of stream can be used to mark out a certain length of time from any starting point in time. It's not in any way *like* time, any more than a pendulum is like time. It's just a way of measuring a certain length of time against a fixed extent of space (in this case the arc of the pendulum rather than a length of stream).

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    8. Re:On Other Dimensions by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Sorry, but a dimension is actually more general than that. In some datasets, e.g., color might be a dimension.

      Generally when we aren't being special and particular we want to use dimension to something that varies independently of other dimensions, and which as a continuous range of values. This is why it's quite reasonable to consider time as a dimension, as well as up-down, left-right, and forward-back, but weight is also sometimes worth considering as a dimension, and size can have dimensions independent of centroid.

      Where things get strange is where we start considering extra spatial dimensions. Time seems to get in to the mix honestly, but most other dimensions are shucked off. So one is left with 4 observable space-time dimensions. But the math seems to want there to be more...but there's no obvious physical interpretation. I actually think the best thing to do is to say "These are things that the math wants. They are very like things from the math that are normally interpreted as spatial dimensions, but it's not really clear how you should interpret them. They almost always, however, drop out when you solve the equations for anything that you'll encounter, so you don't really need to interpret them."

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    9. Re:On Other Dimensions by Boronx · · Score: 1

      Is that really the motivation? Strong gravity? How the heck do neutron stars fit into such a scheme?!

  16. no one behind the curtain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    just goo & new clear charges plus the undefeatable spirit of creation.. never a better time to consult with momkind our spiritual centerpeace. free the innocent stem cells they have harmed no one.

    if we like our current smoke & mirrors.......

  17. Re:wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why cancer? Why not aids? Or ebola? Or the common cold?

    Actually, since you are telling people who have no skills related to biology that they should just suddenly jump ship and try and cure cancer, what are you doing to that end? Let me guess, you're the PHB who yells at everyone else to "just do it"?

  18. Recursive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It's R2D2 all the way down, man.

    1. Re:Recursive by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      It's hologram-projecting robot turtles all the way down, man.

      Ah, much better.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    2. Re:Recursive by CreatureComfort · · Score: 3, Funny

      The hot grits are still real to me, dammit!

      --
      "Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
      Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
  19. Re:wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes, but I only worry about how much piss comes out when I'm unable to unzip my pants. Once I'm able to unzip my pants, it doesn't matter how much piss comes out.

  20. The Universe is Flat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    So beyond the obvious faults with this oversimplification, the Universe is Flat? Perhaps not in the way a table is flat... but still.

  21. Re:wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well I was wasting time reading it for fun but now I'm doing it out of gut-wrenching depression that I'm not doing anything worthwhile.

  22. How about by Lawrence_Bird · · Score: 1

    String theory et al give us some testable predictions? Until then its just a crock of bullshit that has wasted 30 years of physics (though certainly enhanced the bottom line of many a journal).

  23. Now I know! by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

    ... where my evil twin is residing!

    --
    Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  24. They're talking about the AdS/CFT corresondence. by BitterOak · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's more about it here. This recent work basically suggests that the theory might be true. It is a doubly useful theory in that it allows certain difficult problems in string theory to be solved in the language of conformal field theories and vice versa. If nothing else, it means string theory can be used as a computational tool in certain problems of condensed matter physics even if string theory doesn't pan out as a theory for quantum gravity. But it also makes string theory more likely as a theory for quantum gravity as it makes it in some sense compatible with the holographic principle, which among other things provides a solution to the information paradox of black holes.

    --
    If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
  25. Re:wow by ichthus · · Score: 1

    But, don't you see? This shows that cancer is just part of a simulation. Now, we just need to figure out a way to break out of the simulation (like Neo) and... will the cancer to be gone... or something.

    (I'm rolling my eyes as I type this. This whole simulation premise is just a modern rehash of ancient philosophical machination.)

    --
    sig: sauer
  26. Re:Horseshit by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Holograms are not projected 'onto' something.
    They 'materialize' in thin air, that is the point about a hologram. (Hollow != Solid)

    --
    Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  27. Re:Horseshit by Nemyst · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You do realize that quantum mechanics were met with similar derision? Heck, Einstein never really accepted the notion, and that's as great a scientist as we've ever had. It took years to devise experiments that could validate quantum mechanics' existence.

    This isn't to say that this theory is right or wrong, merely that groundbreaking theories almost invariably will look like "mathematical fancy" to most people (especially those with "get off my lawn!" syndrome) and will be met with confusion or denial by a lot of others, including respected scientists. It's crazy, but it might just work. Remember: the universe wasn't designed so that our puny minds would find it logical or straightforward. It just is.

  28. If the universe is just a simulation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can I get a few minutes with the source code and a quick reboot?

    1. Re:If the universe is just a simulation by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2

      Sorry, but on this system, we don't allow self-modifying code.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    2. Re:If the universe is just a simulation by vikingpower · · Score: 1

      Yeah, you can anonymously check out the source code from our SVN server, located near the big black hole at the center of the Andromeda galaxy. Please take into account, however, that network latency may delay your project, although network jitter is near-inexistant.

      --
      Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
  29. Computer -- Arch! by sandbagger · · Score: 1

    Of course, this could mean that half of the potential alternative projections of reality will turn out to be slightly shittier versions of what we have now.

    But the other half will have jet packs and rocket cars! And no marketing directors!

    --
    ---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
  30. One problem by smooth+wombat · · Score: 1

    Now that we are searching for evidence of this hologram, and may be close to establishing something approaching 'proof', won't the folks projecting the hologram alter the program to make it more difficult for us to determine if we are living in a hologram and thus negate our findings which will lead us to do more research and in turn cause the hologram to be changed again? Rinse and repeat.

    --
    We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
  31. Re:Horseshit by hopffiber · · Score: 2

    Nobody is saying that the universe is precisely a hologram stored on a flat plane, so before you call it horseshit, you could try to read what they are actually saying. Also, the particular theory they are talking about here has actually been tested, at least somewhat: people used it to compute some stuff about gluon plasma, which they then tested against LHC data, and it matched quite well. So the theories do work, and they can be used to compute real predictions.

  32. Relax by UneducatedSixpack · · Score: 0

    You are having typical type mismatch and buffer overflow. Relax. My brain fried when I heard about quantum theory. I do not try to understand physics anymore. Somebody will find a way to test all these crazy theories one day. Then we will live in a parallel universe and real estate on earth will be really cheap.

  33. Ampletuhedrons? by Kismet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is this related to the work that Arkani Hamed and Trnka are doing with Ampletuhedrons? They have discovered a geometry that simplifies calculations and that suggests space and time might not be fundamental to physics.

    1. Re:Ampletuhedrons? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is something I was thinking too. I think the word 'hologram' is being tossed around too freely. Time and space may not be fundamental parameters, just projections of something more fundamental. The ideal of a hologram may be applicable to that projection, but that's as far as it goes.

  34. Re:Horseshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All 3D holograms can be stored in two dimensions. Stop "debunking" science you do not even begin to grasp the faintest notion of.

  35. What this means by Fuseboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Someone clever was working out the maximum entropy of a black hole, and found that (unexpectedly) it was proportional to the surface area of the event horizon, not its volume. After some more thought, other clever people found that the full state of every particle that falls into a black hole remains encoded as oscillations and deformations of its surface area.

    This leads to the realization that the despite the fact that a black hole's event horizon is seemingly much simpler than a full-dimensional portion of a universe, it's theoretically possible that it's just as rich a simulation. Perhaps the "real" representation of the universe is actually just a rippling membrane, and the 3D view we see around us is just an alternate interpretation. This is where the word "hologram" comes in - it's only an analogy (because flattish holograms seem to encode 3D data).

    Now, the word "real" is misleading - neither representation is 'more true', it's just that the fewer-dimensional representation might be a lot simpler. A comparable situation is the way the earth goes around the sun, or the sun goes around the earth. A stationary sun makes models of the planetary orbits a heck of a lot simpler, but a stationary earth makes it a lot easier to give directions to your party.

    All of this was theoretical until this recent finding. The researches created two mathematical models of the universe - one of them ten-dimensional (similar to some forms of modern theories of our universe, though the article points out their model was simpler). The other model was a one-dimensional universe filled with ideal springs. These models were identical, in the same way as the 3D universe and the event horizon - they're alternate ways of calculating the same thing.

    The researchers discovered that simulations in both of these universe models have the same output - in other words, they do seem to be different ways of describing the same universe.

    1. Re:What this means by mbone · · Score: 1

      All of this was theoretical until this recent finding. The researches created two mathematical models of the universe - one of them ten-dimensional (similar to some forms of modern theories of our universe, though the article points out their model was simpler). The other model was a one-dimensional universe filled with ideal springs. These models were identical, in the same way as the 3D universe and the event horizon - they're alternate ways of calculating the same thing.

      The researchers discovered that simulations in both of these universe models have the same output - in other words, they do seem to be different ways of describing the same universe.

      It's still theoretical. There is absolutely no experimental evidence for any of this.

    2. Re:What this means by Fuseboy · · Score: 1

      Right - it's still theoretical that any of this applies to our universe. It's no longer theoretical that two physical models can be related in this way.

    3. Re:What this means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Informative and funny - thank you sir!

    4. Re:What this means by Immerman · · Score: 1

      Not quite. *Every* theory we currently hold as "true" is actually our "most broadly accepted educated guess so far". Science doesn't concern itself with "truth", it concerns itself with predictively useful descriptive models of reality, which this has apparently shown itself to be. As such it *already* applies to our universe, if only in that it gives us an alternate way to model the universe which makes some hard problems easy to solve.

      You could just as easily say there's no proof that the whole four-dimensional universe thing is real, it could just be one of the more immediately useful perceptions of reality to evolve in our animal ancestors.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    5. Re:What this means by runeghost · · Score: 1

      Mod parent up. Best layman's explanation of this I've seen yet.

    6. Re:What this means by stub667 · · Score: 1

      ... and if the 3D universe is just a projection of a 2D surface, then the Flat Earthers where right all along :-O

  36. So is actually a Rimmerverse? by future+assassin · · Score: 1

    and earth is Rimmer world?

    --
    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
    1. Re:So is actually a Rimmerverse? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 2

      That would explain why nobody around here gets the girl.

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  37. Re:Horseshit by gstoddart · · Score: 1

    The universe is not a hologram stored on a flat plane.
    Holograms are not stored in 2 dimensions.
    If you project a hologram you have to project it onto something.

    Ummm ... from what I recall of linear algebra (and possibly a little calculus), a hologram is a special case of a projection onto a plane, only your 'plane' is now 3 dimensions. And you can keep extending that ad nauseum -- as in you can project 7 dimensions onto 4 dimensions too, if you can figure out a way to make that mean something to you.

    In which case I think they're talking about projection from n-dimensions onto m-dimensions, where m < n and n=9 in this case.

    It's not a plane per-se. It's a smaller set of dimensions with a representation of something in higher dimensions. Relative to 4 dimensions, 3 dimensions is a 'plane' (I forget the mathematical term).

    Physicists need to stop tugging their dicks in mathematical fancy and start developing ways to TEST things.

    Well, at a certain point, theoretical physics devolves into abstract math, and people trying to come up with models which explain what we see.

    I mostly agree with you, because string theory always seems like it's so abstract as to serve no purpose. However, I'm also not qualified to do the math and fully follow the logic behind it.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  38. Re:They're talking about the AdS/CFT corresondence by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    It's somewhat disturbing to me that in addition to not understanding the summary, I also don't understand your explanation or for that matter, what the topic under discussion even might be (other than some vague physics thing).

    Also I realized apparently I don't know what a holograph is.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  39. They're wrong by maroberts · · Score: 1

    People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... timey wimey... stuff.

    --

    Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
    Karma: Chameleon

  40. I don't have the language to explain it... by Kaenneth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The way I think of the universe, is like a 11 dimensional sphere of putty, that got hit with a hammer. (aka the big bang).

    So, the sphere got deformed spraying outward in 3 dimensions (space) while flying off into a 4th (time) and the other 7 dimensions got compressed.

    A Particle is a bit of energy caught in a loop around some number of those 7 dimensions, each combination of possible wrapping gives a different fundamental particle, with antiparticles having the same wrap, but opposing spin.

    Light/radio 'waves' are caused by the photons looping around one of the higher dimensions, not one of our 3 spatial dimensions, which is how it is travelling in a straight line space, yet still taking a wavering path; like a piece of string wrapped around an infinitesimally small cylinder.

    But that's just my mental model, it work well enough to keep me from going mad (I think)

    1. Re:I don't have the language to explain it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In my layman mind it also explains entanglement. Entangled particles never really leave each other but are projected as if they do in our spatial dimensions. Which means that the two locations they seem to be in, actually stay connected in other dimensions, without even using wormholes. Hard to explain, but every point in our space can therefore be connected to any other point in space, using the extra dimensions. Or put differently, our entire universe can be just one point in these other dimensions.

  41. Nothing very new, and nothing about our universe by hopffiber · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, the headline is quite wrong. Nothing in this work has directly to do with our universe, nor does it show that we live in a hologram. What it does do is provide some further evidence for a string theory conjecture called AdS/CFT. This conjecture says that "string theory in d dimensions" is precisely the same as "conformal field theory in d-1 dimensions". This is cute, since it lets us calculate some things, for example, one might be interested in calculating something in some field theory, but it is very difficult to do. AdS/CFT lets us translate that thing into a string theory thing, which usually is easier to compute. So people working in condensed matter physics, particle physics and QCD are actually using this string theory conjecture as a computational tool. However, AdS/CFT tells us nothing about our universe, since we know that the type of string theories it talks about can't describe our universe. So it is "only" a useful toy model and computational tool. The article is about that some guys have run computer simulations to calculate something on both sides, so both on the string side, and in the field theory side, and what they get match, as it should if the conjecture is true. This is nice and lends further evidence to the conjecture, but there is plenty of other evidence already known, both numerical and theoretical. So I fail to see how this is important or newsworthy, it feels mostly like useless hype.

  42. Re:wow by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

    Don't you understand? There's a hologram which contains everything about the world. Including how to cure cancer. And those scientists are just starting to understand how to read it.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  43. So basically by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    God is watching us on TV?

  44. Re:wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Agreed. I don't get arguments from parent x 2. There's 7+ Billion people on this planet. It isn't a matter of focusing on 1 thing or another. There's enough people to attack everything, all at once. Posters problem seems to be how money, and time of free will, are being spent. That in and of itself, speaks volumes to their narrowmindedness.

  45. Re:wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If we broke off the simulation we might cause cancer on the true reality.... read Rasen, one of the sequels of Ringu....

  46. Cool, but my head hurts by BLToday · · Score: 1

    Cool, but my head hurts trying to understand the theory.

  47. Modern physics and modern art by dskoll · · Score: 1

    They both leave me wondering if they're just big jokes perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.

    1. Re:Modern physics and modern art by CaptainLard · · Score: 1

      I'll give you modern art but in the case of physics (and really, science in general) there is little evidence that the public ever hears the "jokes".

  48. Re:They're talking about the AdS/CFT corresondence by tlhIngan · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's somewhat disturbing to me that in addition to not understanding the summary, I also don't understand your explanation or for that matter, what the topic under discussion even might be (other than some vague physics thing).

      Also I realized apparently I don't know what a holograph is.

    Basically, there are two major concepts.

    First, is duality. This is where two models can represent the same system (they are duals of each other). The thing with duality is that in many cases, a problem that is impossible to solve in one model may be trivially done in another. You may know the duality between time-domain and frequency-domain systems - a convolution in one is a multiplication in the other (which is handy for some really difficult convolutions).

    The other concept is a hologram. Take a traditional hologram you can buy as a souvenir - it's just a flat piece of transparent material (glass or plastic), yet look through it and you see a 3D image hovering in space - projected if you will, in 3D. And it is 3D, because you can look around the object. Yet the object is stored on a 2D medium. (FYI - the same concept applies to holographic sights - the dot is projected on the target in 3D space). Holograms are useful because they can cast higher dimensional spaces into lower dimensional spaces, yet retain the original resolution and details of the higher dimensional space (or how they get a 3D projection on a 2D surface).

    Holographic theory is one where our 3D world is actually on a 2D surface. Like a hologram.

    Now, what the results are is that they found a set of dual systems that represent reality - between string theory and quantum mechanics using holographic theory. In other words, they could do a calculation using string theory and have the results line up with quantum mechanics (and holograms). By proving this, a difficult problem in quantum mechanics can be translated to string theory and be easily solved there, then the results translated back, which gives the same answer as if you did it the hard way.

  49. Re:wow by DaveV1.0 · · Score: 1
    String [] things = {"computers", "electronics", "roads", "bridges", "space flight", "aeronautics", "new materials", "solar energy", "improved batteries" };
    for (this : things){
    System.out.println("why oh why are scientists wasting time on " + this + "? one step at at time, for now figure out how to cure cancer before worrying about the big picture. you must unzip your pants before worrying about how much piss comes out");
    }

    Does that answer it for you?

    --
    There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
  50. Re:Horseshit by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

    The "hol" in hologram comes from whole, not hole, which is where the "hol" in hollow comes from.

    The "hol" in holy also comes from whole, too.

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  51. Re:Horseshit by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    Holograms are not stored in 2 dimensions.

    Not in our universe, perhaps.

    Physicists need to stop tugging their dicks in mathematical fancy and start developing ways to TEST things.

    As opposed to Slashdotters who waggle their knobs in the air, making themselves feel smart by declaring that physicists are all stupid, because if they (John Q. Slashdotter) can't understand an analogy then it can't be true.

    "Hologram" here is not meant to suggest that there's literally a light-years wide piece of photographic film floating out in a lower-level universe with us encoded on it. You may as well argue that regular explosions don't create matter so the big bang theory* must be a load of rubbish.

    *Yes, I know that's also the name of a TV show. No, you're not going to be funny if you pick up on that.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  52. Re:Wrong again! by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    It's simple, Descartes was right and you are wrong. The Universe is not a big computer simulation, and you do exist.

    How do you know? If you can actually prove those things you deserve a Nobel prize. Oh, wait, let me guess. You're not a scientist.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  53. Re:Horseshit by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

    My 5 minute search, I am unable to see evidence whole and hole are related, which is possible, ironically, since they are kind of opposites. In any case, even if so, hologram derives from the concept of whole, not hollow/hole.

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  54. Dynamic Theory of Gravity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Everyone should read about Nikola Tesla's Dynamic Theory of Gravity. This explains the workings of the cosmos much better than Relativity, and Quantum Physics. Because Dynamic Theory of Gravity leave no gaps between the quantum world, and everything else. Tesla makes Einstein, and Hawking look like a baby trying to learn advanced Chemistry. If you put them both together, they could not even come close to the IQ of Tesla.

    1. Re:Dynamic Theory of Gravity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tesla gets way too much credit.

    2. Re:Dynamic Theory of Gravity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      he hardly gets any credit

    3. Re:Dynamic Theory of Gravity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Every online forum that even remotely touches on any subject that can be related to Tesla has a million fanboys screaming that he invented everything from Oxygen to the internet. He may have not gotten much credit in your junior high earth and space science class but his name is plastered everywhere else.
       
      Sadly this has lead to a ton of misinformation and people who repeat lies that are easily dismissible with a 30 second search on Google. So we've gone from an obscure genius to a guy who damn near walked on water according to the peanut gallery who doesn't know a gamma ray from a stingray.
       
      I wish people involved themselves more in learning science then being a fanboy of a scientist. Tesla would agree and if he was a man of any substance he'd be dismayed by the shit that gets spread in his name today.

  55. Hmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That would seem to support some of the things Tesla proposed. Weird.

  56. FSCK Star Trek, not another Holodeck episode! by DarthVain · · Score: 1

    Just because we are all holograms does that make us any less real? I think therefore I am! I have feelings damn it! :)

  57. Re:Horseshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I thought it came from 'holistic', but I could have just been spending too much time around those newage hippies.

  58. Re:Horseshit by uCallHimDrJ0NES · · Score: 1

    Obviously, you've never met Automan.

    --
    Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
  59. stupid headlines by globaljustin · · Score: 1

    I tend to assume that any model which says our universe is a simulation (or whatever) is just gibberish and cute math tricks

    yes. this is absolutely correct and I think this every time I read anything about the 'holographic' universe

    however, TFA, once you get past the headlines, doesn't really explain much beyond quoting the researchers on the work's *implications* on string theory and quantum mechanics in general

    so, it really isn't that informative

    what they're really saying is that the universe is ***made of light***....or say 'electro-magnetic radiation' instead of light b/c its more than visible light obv.

    think of the edge of the universe as the edge of a black hole event horizon...in this case, a true 'black body'...at the event horizon, the last thing we can know about the matter/energy at all is the last "light" (aka electro magnetic radiation of all bands) before the very waves of light meet the infinite chaos that is the black hole event horizon. The moment it crosses it is instantaneously obliterated/absorbed by the nothingness/black hole

    to put this into context, one branch of a part of high energy physics was founded on a distinction between some old ruling observation/theorem and then the Cosmic Microwave Background came along and flipped everything on its head...the universe is accelerating when it should be decelerating...that new energy pushing the acceleration is 'dark energy'

    but, according to this research, we can still have a universe that is essentially made of electro-magnetic radiation...vibrating through the *medium* of the 1-dimensional "strings"...but that's another topic

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
  60. Re:Horseshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Last I checked the definition, holography was crafting a visual that's subjective to viewing angle (causing 3D) on a 2D medium. The last couple words refer to solids.

    Projections onto glass (eg gorillaz/vocaloid concerts) that appear the same from any angle wouldn't qualify. Holograms today are usually suspended in glass or whatever, but some are flatter and in effect they're like a sculpture inside a paper (2D medium, I don't mean actual tree pulp) the feel of which you may recognize from 3D TV, the 3DS, or from stereoscopic images.

    The more mainstream (scifi) variant is detached sources of light, all of which are subject to viewing angle (even block each other somehow). The cause/origin ("materialization"?) of these floating light sources is usually vague.

    None of what I've written has much to do with the article, the headline of which REALLY should boil down to "evidence found supporting Maldacena's 16-year-old idea [1]."

    [1] - our stringtheoryverse is causality from a flatverse, conflicting formulae rejoice

    Ironically, parent post was bitching about testing shit when the article is about physicist testing actual numbers (eg energy values of black holes, universes, see TFA) with results that support Maldacena's 16-year-old idea.

    So what we're bitching about (without realizing it) is sensationalized headlines. But don't blame the media/journalists, whose industry is just reacting intelligently to a derped facetweet population. Which brings us full circle to this page's very first post, where a /.er sarcastically points out that people really do namedrop flashy science on socnets to pretend they're associated with intellectual subjects.

    -- AC.Falos

  61. Greek by sbjornda · · Score: 1

    The "hol" in hologram comes from whole, not hole, which is where the "hol" in hollow comes from.

    Sorry, it comes from the ancient Greek word 'holos' (modern 'olos') which means whole, complete, or entire.

    The word 'holy' is an English word, not a Greek word.

    --
    .nosig

    1. Re:Greek by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      I was about to write the same, but my post got eaten by the holy ...

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  62. Rectal-cranial inversion syndrome. by VortexCortex · · Score: 2

    The search for equations to more accurately describe the observable universe is often first formed as a hypothesis, then once the hypothesis is formalized and can be tested it may become a Theory or Law. One can come to such equations through direct observation, such as thermodynamics or Newtonian Gravity, or be theoretical until proven, like Einstein's curved space-time. In other words one can observe something strange then attempt to explain it, or formulate explanations that cover known observations and look for other oddities it may predict later.

    String theory of today is not the same as it was 30 years ago. "Crock of Bullshit" isn't remotely descriptive. Once worked out the equations may predict counter-intuitive results, such as when Einstein's equations indicated Black Holes existed... Doubters were rebuffed when we discovered them. All of the equations of physics are wrong -- or, more correctly: they are inaccurate estimations of reality, some are more accurate than others. Newtonian Gravity was verified through observation, and the gravitational constant was calculated -- We later discovered this was wrong. However, it's still a damn good approximation.

    Was it a waste for Newton to study gravitation? It had no immediate practical application for every day life, except to explain oddities of celestial motion... We continue to search for a set of equations that are more accurate than what we have now. The history of physics is rife with explosions of disparate equations, and then collapsing of them into more overarching elegant systems of understanding. Equations that provide more accurate results are testable via more accurate observations, even if the equations are not founded on direct physical observation themselves.

    When some suggest that "The Universe is like unto a Hologram" due to examination of String Theory, and you call the very equations untestable predictions you only provide direct evidence that that low UID numbers do not necessarily correlate with intelligence, knowledge, or wisdom.
    QED.

    1. Re:Rectal-cranial inversion syndrome. by Lawrence_Bird · · Score: 1

      and you call the very equations untestable predictions you only provide direct evidence that that low UID numbers do not necessarily correlate with intelligence, knowledge, or wisdom.

      A lengthy reply and typical of the string evangelicals - a cult on a par with Apple fan boys. How dare anyone suggest that 30 to 40 years of have been wasted by thousands of physicists (can only imagine the conversion to man-hours)!

      Of course, the reality is that there are many physicists who believe exactly as I do - that the "theory" will never prove anything testable, has wasted a huge amount of resources and has been closer to "welfare for physicists" than anything else. However, I will not deny that some very esoteric maths have gotten a big boost from it over the years.

      It is time to put S-Matrix theory and its successors to bed and come up with some new ideas.

  63. Its a simulation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sorry couldn't resist thinking of two scenes.

    >SNIPSNIP
    [McKittrick] (McKittrick approaches Beringer) Jack, there's nothing to indicate a simulation at all. Everything is working perfectly!
    [Stephen Falken] But does it make any sense?
    [General Beringer] Does what make any sense?
    [Stephen Falken] (points to the screens) That!

    1. Re:Its a simulation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Doh...

      Sorry couldn't resist thinking of two scenes.

      [Richter] (Running across the war room) It's a simulation! Stop! Stop! It's a Simulation
      [General Beringer] Woh! You can't be running in here, someone could get hurt.

      [McKittrick] (McKittrick approaches Beringer) Jack, there's nothing to indicate a simulation at all. Everything is working perfectly!
      [Stephen Falken] But does it make any sense?
      [General Beringer] Does what make any sense?
      [Stephen Falken] (points to the screens) That!

  64. Re:Horseshit by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

    I met automake, that was bad enough :)

    --
    Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  65. Re:Wrong again! by s.petry · · Score: 1

    How do I know? Logic, study, rational thought. Why can't these scientists "prove" their theory either? These thoughts are interesting study for Philosophy, and I have studied and written Philosophy for 35+ years. Oh, wait, let me guess. You are not a Philosopher, and perhaps don't understand why Philosophy is relevant to science.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  66. Re:wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No, 'this' is a reserved word in java.

  67. There's always a relevant XKCD cartoon by Chelloveck · · Score: 1
    --
    Chelloveck
    I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
  68. I think it means 2D MySQL can describe reality by raymorris · · Score: 1

    My understanding of what it REALLY means is that a model with few dimensions can describe a reality with many dimensions. TFS presumes that the small model is "real" and the many-dimensioned model is the "projection". Database designers see that it's the opposite - reality is complex, but it can be represented using a calculus that has two dimensions, like tables in MySql.

  69. Sorry Doctor, But the by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    vibrating octolpes of the quantum molecular fluctuating filter flanges clearly disproves this theory, we are in fact a decagram, not a hologram.

  70. Re:Wrong again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You might want to read up on what a hologram is. Hint: hologram != simulation.

  71. Re:wow by istartedi · · Score: 2

    for now figure out how to cure cancer before worrying about the big picture.

    Boy will you have egg on your face when their research leads to the development of a machine that allows us to isolate and neutralize all the cancer cells in a body in one quick pass. Yes, as a side effect it will actually cause an egg to materialize, go to your house, knock on your door, and hit you. Right in the face. That's the wonder of quantum mechanics.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  72. Sim City by TheMadTopher · · Score: 1

    Our existence is just some entity's game of Sim City.

  73. Evidence by mbone · · Score: 1

    . But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive. In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena's conjecture is true."

    Not. Even. Wrong.

    None of this is evidence of anything, and anyone who takes these ideas for granted, without the slightest experimental proof whatsoever, can be assumed to be no longer talking about physics.

  74. Absurd by cshark · · Score: 1

    Arbitrary simulations are not evidence of anything. If you can't even accurately model the planet in a simulation for weather patterns, how do you expect to model something as complex as the universe?

    --

    This signature has Super Cow Powers

  75. Re:Horseshit by mbone · · Score: 1

    That is exactly backwards. Unlike General Relativity, quantum mechanics was driven by experiment almost every step of the way. It was met with some derision (and worse, see, e.g., Nazi Germany), but it was experimentally based. (BTW, Einstein accepted that it explained the (then available) experimental data, he just thought that it wasn't the entire explanation.)

  76. Re:wow by geekoid · · Score: 1

    "one step at at time,"
    so the wheel should not have been invented until cancer was cured?

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  77. Re:wow by geekoid · · Score: 1

    no, it is not.
    It might not be real, but it does fit with the current scientific understanding. I suspect a simpler solution will be found.
    Then everyone will slap their forehead and say 'U=ET cubed! of course it's so trivial!

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  78. JEM? by starcraftsicko · · Score: 1

    JEM?

  79. Re:Wrong again! by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 2

    How do I know? Logic, study, rational thought.

    Oh, that's me convinced then.

    Any evidence?

    Why can't these scientists "prove" their theory either?

    I expect they're trying, which is better than simply declaring something to be true.

    These thoughts are interesting study for Philosophy, and I have studied and written Philosophy for 35+ years.

    Or so you believe. Perhaps you and the rest of what we call reality were brought into existence as of last Thursday at the behest of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  80. Finally by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    Vindication.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  81. Re:Horseshit by rasmusbr · · Score: 1

    You do realize that quantum mechanics were met with similar derision? Heck, Einstein never really accepted the notion, and that's as great a scientist as we've ever had. It took years to devise experiments that could validate quantum mechanics' existence.

    This isn't to say that this theory is right or wrong, merely that groundbreaking theories almost invariably will look like "mathematical fancy" to most people (especially those with "get off my lawn!" syndrome) and will be met with confusion or denial by a lot of others, including respected scientists. It's crazy, but it might just work. Remember: the universe wasn't designed so that our puny minds would find it logical or straightforward. It just is.

    Another thing that can happen is that scientists apply doublethink. So for example, many scientist simultaneously believed for about 200 years that everything that happens boils down to small particles interacting through direct contact (aka bouncing off of one another) and that Newton's theory of gravity, which relies on attractive forces in empty space, were both valid. Think about it for a while. How do you get an attractive force by bouncing stuff of other stuff? Well, here are some attempts at squaring that circle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_explanations_of_gravitation.

    Many scientists today believe that the universe is deterministic, even though the math, which is supported by mountains of evidence, require it to have all sorts of uncertainties built-in.

  82. Re:Horseshit by mbone · · Score: 1

    ...so before you call it horseshit, you could try to read what they are actually saying. Also, the particular theory they are talking about here has actually been tested, at least somewhat: people used it to compute some stuff about gluon plasma, which they then tested against LHC data, and it matched quite well. So the theories do work, and they can be used to compute real predictions.

    Which papers are these? The two papers referenced above do not discuss this at all, and I am not aware of any LHC results dealing with quantum gravity. References would be appreciated.

  83. Re:They're talking about the AdS/CFT corresondence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So... what I'm getting out of that explanation is that it's entirely possible that our universe is like the Galaxy in Men in Black. In a small jewel within another Universe which is possibly within another in the same way, etc etc.

    Awesome. Let's hope no one destroys it.

  84. Re:Wrong again! by s.petry · · Score: 1

    Evidence? Sure, go read Descartes from start to finish. That is better evidence you get from these alleged scientists inventing theories and inventing scenarios to make their hypothetical theories possible. If you claim that theoretical numbers are "evidence" you really need to look up the definition.

    Or so you believe. Perhaps you and the rest of what we call reality were brought into existence as of last Thursday at the behest of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

    Reductio ad absurdum is exactly what I expect as a defense for hypothetical theories that people claim are factual. Broken logic tends to lead to further broken logic, glad to see you play the game so well.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  85. No by OglinTatas · · Score: 1

    You must worry about how much piss comes out before you unzip your pants.

    Will you get to the toilet in time? Will the door be locked, or will there be a line?

  86. Re:wow by Immerman · · Score: 1

    for now figure out how to cure cancer before worrying about the big picture

    Why would you want to waste time on that? Nothing you or anyone else ever does will save a single life, only postpone that death. Everybody dies, and in fact cancer is an example of the sort of problems that emerge when you solve the easy problems - keep hostile organisms from killing the body and eventually it breaks down on it's own. Entropy always wins, every scientist knows that. The interesting thing is what we do with whatever time we have. And in fact entropy *helps* with that - new things cannot grow where the old refuse to make room.

    --
    --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  87. But this experiment says it isn't... by povey · · Score: 2

    Can anyone explain why this result doesn't contradict this one?
    http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/07/06/137634397/physicists-almost-certain-the-universe-is-not-a-hologram

    Are we talking about different things here?

  88. Twinkle twinkle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well Plato in new clothes....... So Something new, Something borrowed, And then comes Something blue (should I be looking for The TARDIS then:)))

  89. Physicists Conjecture Another Improbable Theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's mostly what physicists do these days. Create interesting but unproven, and sometimes unprovable, conjectures. At least the fundamental physicists. "The math is not inconsistent" is all it takes to stir them up.

    Tough to get excited about this stuff if you're not a physicist.

  90. Re:wow by riverat1 · · Score: 1

    Considering the phrase "just do it" in the GP shouldn't that be Swoosh (tm)!

  91. Re:Wrong again! by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    Evidence? Sure, go read Descartes from start to finish.

    And that will convince me, scientifically, that the universe can't possibly be a simulation? Why has no-one picked up a Nobel prize for physics for this yet?! Oh, yeah, maybe because it's not true. Don't believe me? Go read War and Peace from start to finish, it's all in there.

    That is better evidence you get from these alleged scientists inventing theories and inventing scenarios to make their hypothetical theories possible.

    They're inventing theories to make their theories possible? What does that mean?

    They're following someone else's theory's implications and have narrowed the gaps where discrepancies may have hidden. It's not proof, but it is an interesting indication that puts the theory on a more solid footing.

    Reductio ad absurdum is exactly what I expect as a defense

    Finding something that someone says absurd doesn't make it a reductio ad absurdum . I'm not sure what I'm meant to have reductio'd from, and my claim about the FSM isn't absurd. Unlikely, yes, but not - in the sense inherent in the definition of reductio ad absurdum - absurd. That's the whole point of such arguments - they're unfalsifiable.

    for hypothetical theories

    What's a "hypothetical theory"? They're just theories. This particular one is currently unfalsified, at least by any scientific measure. Is that what you meant?

    that people claim are factual.

    I'm not claiming the universe is a hologram. The writers of these papers aren't claiming the universe is a hologram. They're just showing that the idea is more consistent with observation than it was previously understood to be.

    You are explicitly claiming the universe isn't a hologram, though. I'm asking for scientific, not philosophical, evidence to back up your claim. What observations of the universe can you cite which disprove the holographic theory?

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  92. My PHYS 328 professor told us . . . by galaxybeing · · Score: 1

    . . . the universe is written in its own language, CU (Common Universe).

  93. Re:wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You must be a fundamentalist Christian Republican or something. Regardless: You're the cancer that's killing sentience in humans.

  94. Excellent; My Kind Of Universe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'll just ignore the bar tabs in Hong Kong, Singapore, London and San Francisco and the ex-wives attorneys in more places that I have time to pound on the keyboard.

    Cheers

  95. Re:Horseshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hologram is a reference to a familiar system designed to make a very abstract, difficult to understand idea more accessible to laypeople. This is something called an analogy. You may find that many people who study things will use these so-called analogies in order to make concepts in their field understandable to outsiders who don't understand the details of the underlying theories.

    Hint: GR theorists don't actually think we're ants on a balloon when they give the ant-on-a-balloon analogy for the expansion of space, quantum physicists don't actually put cats in boxes with poison gas, and biologists don't actually think proteins are cute little interlocking polyhedrons.

  96. Re:Wrong again! by mcgrew · · Score: 1

    How's your math? Have you looked at it or read the papers? Or did you just figure "that's bullshit" based on an article about it written by someone whose major was English?

  97. reminds me of a humorist Dave Barry on College: by volvox_voxel · · Score: 3, Funny
    Dave Barry on College - "After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts.."

    "So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:"

    ...

    "PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs...."

    http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~martine/light/barrycollege.html

    Unfortunately, some aspects of physics are starting to sound like Dave Barry's take on Philosophy..

    1. Re:reminds me of a humorist Dave Barry on College: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...to you. You're a idiot. Get me a coffee.

    2. Re:reminds me of a humorist Dave Barry on College: by volvox_voxel · · Score: 1

      I am not an idiot, at least most of the time, but we all have our little intransigent moments..

      Etymology of "Idiot" --a word derived from the Greek "..." ("person lacking professional skill")

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

  98. Re:wow by sjames · · Score: 1

    Remember those kooky physicists working on that nuclear stuff rather than on the deadly disease of the day?

    Their work is applied to cancer treatment every day now.

  99. Re:Wrong again! by s.petry · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I read the work. Did you read the work, or just assume that it's pretty cool stuff so has to be factual and "evidence"

    Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole (hypothetical), the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe) (hypothetical), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory (hypothetical) as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence (hypothetical)

    Look, I think fantasy stories are pretty cool myself. When you string a whole lot of hypothetical information together, you get a big old hypothetical result. Not evidence, and not fact. String theory has been discounted over and over and over again, which is why the theory has changed dramatically and drastically every couple of years since it was first mentioned. String theory is not factual, and therefor claiming something is true based on a non-factual piece of data is irrational and illogical.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  100. Projection =/= Simulation by Remus+Shepherd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I got into this discussion too late to be noticed, but I feel the need to help people understand that this theory is *NOT* stating the universe is a simulation. Projections are not simulations.

    What the theory suggests is that of all the dimensions we know about (the article mentions 6, which is how many dimensions you get with one flavor of string theory), some of them are illusion. Like a hologram -- a 2D plastic or glass toy that displays a 3D image. The universe does not contain 6 dimensions; it contains a smaller number, and the rest of the dimensions only appear to be there.

    It's likely that the universe contains at least three dimensions, because we would have noticed non-isomorphic behavior in space. But the jury is still out on whether the fourth dimension -- Time -- is an illusion. The same goes for the fifth and sixth dimensions.

    None of this says anything about the universe being simulated. That's a philosophical question that physics will probably never be able to answer.

    --
    Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
    1. Re:Projection =/= Simulation by eyenot · · Score: 1

      Thanks for clearing that up.

      So this is, in other words, "projection" as in the projection of one line onto another line, or the projection of a straight line onto the surface of a sphere (it generates an arc) etc.

      I am looking forward to the day when we've genuinely proven that the universe is a complete and total simulation, though.

      I think the mistake of this article was to use the term "hologram". A convincingly three dimensional laser hologram could be projected onto a cloud of reflective material from stereoscopic images. Our universe might be something similar from a higher number of dimensions. But "hologram" is too close in popular fiction to a "simulation", and most people get at least some of their scientific enthusiasm (and familiar terminology) from science fiction.

      The article could have said "turns out the universe isn't a ball, it's a plane that a ball is projecting onto" but people would have missed the point.

      --
      "Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
  101. Are you doing it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Heeey Macarena!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlzwuFkn88U

  102. Re:Horseshit by sjames · · Score: 1

    Actually, current thinking is that it is stored on the surface of an N-sphere.

  103. Re:Wrong again! by s.petry · · Score: 1

    The fact that we have traveled to external planets should be enough real live proof that things are not illusions outside of our atmosphere. Extrapolate from that. Voyager indicates that the Universe is not a hologram, and a very real physical space full of objects.

    Claiming I need more than observable measurable science is idiocy, especially when you are defending a theory that is based on at least 5 different hypothesis.

    As soon as you claim "it has to be true because of string theory", it is a lie because String theory is not proven. String has it's purposes, but it's not factual and not provable which is why there are so many "string theories" being touted as "the answer to everything" (and none of them have been).

    Nobel used to mean something to academics. Obama receiving the Nobel Prize has been the icing on the cake to show that it is not about academia, but about money, labels, and sucking up.

    Claiming that I must be a Nobel recipient to argue against their hypothesis is an absurd argument. Numerous Physicists and Mathematicians discount string theory because it does not work. Claiming that I need "scientific evidence" not philosophical evidence to discount a theoretical work (based solely on unproven theory and models) is further absurdity. They provided no facts, yet you are treating their work as factual. That didn't even touch on your existentialism comment which was absolutely absurdity.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  104. everything you can't disprove is true by epine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The fixation on "best" accepted theory is more about hubris than insight.

    The Kolmogorov/Chaitin view is that you should believe every statement about the universe that you can't formally disprove—all at the same time— using an exponentially weighted average based on the minimum description length of each viable description (baroque theories with billions of epicycles are down-weighted by k^-1e9, where k is the mean entropy of your typical epicycle). I don't really know the math, so take that with a grain of salt, but it's at least the general idea.

    The standard model is extremely cogent and concise. It will exponentially outweigh practically everything else.

    The only reason this isn't used is that we pretty much never know the minimum description length for anything (there's a result where something akin to minimum description is length is formally proven to be the hardest computation definable), and we can't take the exponentially-weighted integral of all as-yet undisproven theories by any convenient method.

    Any undisproven theory that comes along with the potential to be formulated as cogently (or nearly so) as the standard model should be regarded as valid until proven otherwise (either false, or irredeemably baroque).

    There's no sane reason to impose incumbency politics on theory. Theory is not a vote.

    1. Re:everything you can't disprove is true by Immerman · · Score: 2

      >There's no sane reason to impose incumbency politics on theory. Theory is not a vote.

      So... who gets to decide on the weighting algorithm? After all we have no particular reason to believe the more concise theories are more "true", only more convenient/useful. All you are doing is encoding your preconceptions into a weighting matrix rather than applying them in as a more honestly biased personal belief.

      Face it, "broadly accepted" will likely always be the defining quality, however much mathematical chicanery you may try to wrap it in.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    2. Re:everything you can't disprove is true by marcosdumay · · Score: 1

      After all we have no particular reason to believe the more concise theories are more "true", only more convenient/useful.

      Science is conveniently moving from a "let's find the Truth" to "let's get a usefull result" for a while now. You'll still not see most scientists explicitly agree that they are not looking for Truth anymore, but almost no one in interested in dealing with all the problems that come once you try to look for it.

    3. Re:everything you can't disprove is true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Theory is not about counting noses. This "vox populi, vox dei" crap is even stupider in science than in politics. I don't give a shit what any damn fool thinks, as long as he can make be a sandwich. And if he can't, I don't give him 5$.

      Broadly accepted is as meaningless a criterion as you can find.

    4. Re:everything you can't disprove is true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So what about "Genesis" physics, i.e. "in the beginning ..." or Newtonian mechanics? they both lend themselves to pretty short descriptions, but aren't really true.
      Maybe the theory first needs to be formulated in some ideal language, like the language of Mathematics?

  105. Re:They're talking about the AdS/CFT corresondence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But a hologram isn't a real 3D image is it? It realies on the way our eyes see and our brains process images to create an image we perceive as three dimensional, but that takes place between our ears. So I'm assuming this 'hologram' stuff is really just an analogy and I'm none the wiser, really.

  106. There...is...no...Sanctuary... by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 1

    All...frozen...

  107. It's even worse than that: by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Based on pic in the article, the universe is One Big Goatse

  108. Re:Horseshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The opposite is actually true. Quantum mechanics was born to explain experiments other theories could not. Please read about photoelectric effect here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect

  109. Oy... Nerdgasm... oy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...

  110. Holy shit! I'm AutoMan! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Cursor! I need a car that'll make chicks wet.
    What? No. Not a fire engine!

  111. Tasty Wheat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal, or tuna fish.

  112. Re:Wrong again! by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    The fact that we have traveled to external planets should be enough real live proof that things are not illusions outside of our atmosphere. Extrapolate from that. Voyager indicates that the Universe is not a hologram, and a very real physical space full of objects.

    This demonstrates that you don't actually understand what the holographic principle is. The theory is that the entire universe - ourselves included - are the result of a holographic process. That the "lower level" of reality underlying this one has fewer dimensions than we perceive, and our reality is "merely" a projection (note: this is an analogy. It doesn't mean to suggest there is a massive piece of photographic film floating in a lower space with a big lightbulb illuminating it).

    The fact that we have traveled to external planets should be enough real live proof that things are not illusions outside of our atmosphere.

    It's pretty solid as proof goes, but it's not utterly irrefutable. Once the probes left the atmosphere the data could have been faked by a higher power. Or perhaps the solar system is real but everything outside is not. Anyway, that's a moot point because it's not the theory under discussion .

    As soon as you claim "it has to be true because of string theory", it is a lie because String theory is not proven.

    I haven't claimed any such thing! Why do you keep insisting that I'm claiming any of this is true?

    String has it's purposes, but it's not factual

    First you claim the universe does exist, then you claim string doesn't?! Hah, only kidding. You meant string theory. In which case, my response is: how do you know it's not factual?

    and not provable

    Not proven. Not easily falsifiable either, as I understand the current state of affairs. But they're working on it, and who's to say they won't succeed?

    Claiming that I must be a Nobel recipient to argue against their hypothesis is an absurd argument.

    I haven't claimed that either! Please try and read my posts fully before you reply - I've tried to show you the same courtesy.

    They provided no facts, yet you are treating their work as factual.

    They've provided plenty of facts in the form of mathematical demonstrations of the consistency of certain aspects of the theory.

    Of course I'm treating their work as factual. They did actually do the work. What I assume you mean is I'm treating the theory as being factual, but I am doing nothing of the sort and have said so on more than one occasion.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  113. Amber by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So Zelazny was right after all.

  114. Re:They're talking about the AdS/CFT corresondence by hweimer · · Score: 2

    Too bad that our universe is neither AdS (the cosmological constant is positive) nor ten-dimensional as in the papers.

    --
    OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
  115. GAGUT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    GAGUT probably already got there and these guys are just pussies after the fact.

  116. Dear Universe - I wish you were a hologram by tommten · · Score: 1
    --
    - I choked on the red pill and now I'm stuck in limbo
  117. Re:wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're an idiot.

  118. this totally makes sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The fact that a simulation inside the hologram is showing htat we're in a hologram cannot be denied. I need to change my religious beliefs to something different quick...

  119. Solid Footing??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So concluding the universe is a hologram puts string theory on a "solid footing"? All it shows me is that string theorist are all high, or we need a new definition of "hologram".

  120. Re:They're talking about the AdS/CFT corresondence by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    This recent work basically suggests that the theory might be true.

    Are you sure? It seems more to me like it suggests that the theory might not be false. Lots of models look accurate right up until they don't.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  121. Re:Wrong again! by dave420 · · Score: 1

    Save your electrons. The guy's a big-headed nutter drowning in hubris. If the senior architect himself doesn't think something's true, then nothing on the face of this planet will change his mind.

  122. Re:Horseshit by renoX · · Score: 1

    > You do realize that quantum mechanics were met with similar derision? Heck, Einstein never really accepted the notion, and that's as great a scientist as we've ever had

    And you could add, "and he had a better understanding of quantum mechanic than most of the scientists" cue EPR paradox, how many scientists who accepted QM understood that QM was non local?

  123. That one superstring theory.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I would like to remind people of that one lame superstring theory. It was a joke at college parties... analyzed the book standing up in a library, almost pee'd my pants in the 'science' section. It took forever for the NASA PR guy to come out and remind folks that engineers don't buy fake books, that which remotely stirs interest in theoretical math. Some idiot-savant in a wheelchair comes out and backs something up, do you buy the book?

    File under: How to turn science into religion

  124. is science about absolutes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "at least compelling evidence that Maldacena's conjecture is true."
    Isn't science about theories? Theory of relativity, etc. Newton's Laws turned out not to be the law but its still remains a good theory with limitations.

    It is close to asking: do you believe in evolution? I don't believe in anything. Beliefs are for religions. I think the theory of evolution is the best theory to date. If a better theory comes along with better evidence and support I would change my mind.

  125. Universe or Theory of Universe as a hologram? by uspalt · · Score: 1

    As I understand this post, not the universe is a hologram. Just the string-theory-based description of it can be interpreted as a description of a hologram. This opens the way for an alternative description of the universe as the reality whose hologram-like description is what we understand of it. Unfortunately the original articles are beyond my grasp ...

  126. Re:Wrong again! by s.petry · · Score: 1

    This demonstrates that you don't actually understand what the holographic principle [wikipedia.org] is. The theory is that the entire universe - ourselves included - are the result of a holographic process. That the "lower level" of reality underlying this one has fewer dimensions than we perceive, and our reality is "merely" a projection (note: this is an analogy. It doesn't mean to suggest there is a massive piece of photographic film floating in a lower space with a big lightbulb illuminating it).

    What "other dimensions" that we can't see? There are no other dimensions that we can prove. No version of string theory have been proven, but many versions have been proven to be false. It's neat science fiction, but it is not science fact.

    There is no logical claim that the Nth dimension is real, it's a hypothetical theory based on our inability to detect and measure what's around us. It's like flat earth all over again, and pitched as this thing that all smart should believe in. Yet numerous physicists and mathematicians have been working on models that don't require magical dimensions to show how the Universe has been expanding and working. They don't rely on magical dark energy or magical dark matter (not to be confused with heavy elements) either.

    When you treat a string of theories as factual, it shows that you are either very ignorant or easily manipulated. You show me proof of a 5th dimension, and I'll change my tune. Until then, when you have a theory that claims XY is true and therefor Y is true while Y is an unproven highly controversial theory you have no proof and no fact. Read the work, and this is their claim. "We used string theory to process a model and string theory gave us what string theory predicted." If you don't see the circular logic issue with their work, you are blind.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  127. Re:Wrong again! by s.petry · · Score: 1

    You have factually proven that the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, etc.. dimensions of string theory exist? Hallelujah! String theory is now proven and we can all go home! Fire all of the physicists guys, we don't need them any more!

    Oh wait, that never happened. So me questioning the theory based on logical points is "hubris" and I'm a "nutter". What do you call yourself for having that much belief that this theory is proven? Less intelligent than a turnip, far too ignorant for hubris, and challenged beyond being a nutter?

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  128. Hologram? by FreedomFirstThenPeac · · Score: 1

    Is the use of the term "hologram" designed to imply that an n-dimensional function can describe an (n+m)-dimensional object? The (n+m) dimensional object being a perceptual illusion similar to a hologram?

    --
    "There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
  129. Re:Nothing very new, and nothing about our univers by jfengel · · Score: 1

    However, AdS/CFT tells us nothing about our universe, since we know that the type of string theories it talks about can't describe our universe.

    Is that because AdS corresponds to a negative cosmological constant, and as far as we can tell the cosmological constant is positive?

    This has always confused me. Why are they working in AdS at all? I figured it was because the math was easier, and they were hoping to reach a point where they understood it well enough to flip around the sign of the constant and get the "real universe" back. Or... maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, so I apologize if what I just said was gibberish.

  130. Maybe not turtles *all* the way down... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...but at least at the bottom, at the gravity-less flat cosmos where a turtle can go about its business without a care in the...universe

  131. Re:Horseshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    QM was, and is, the only game in town for why electrons can continuously orbit nuclei, in particular states with well-defined transitions. Atomic spectra were discovered in the 18th century.

    QM is the only game in town for providing cutoffs for the blackbody spectrum. The photon was first introduced in the 19th century by Boltzmann for this purpose.

    Thompson found electrons at the end of the 19th century. 20 years later Bohr determined how atoms work.

    Of course, today, we emphasize the symmetry of the hydrogen atom and the representations of its Lie algebra. Weyl was the one who introduced Lie groups to physicists. But, that's not really where QM came from.

  132. Re:Wrong again! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    philosophy is useful to science because it gives people who are reasonably clever but uncreative and careerist a place to have their careers where they will not get in anyone's way

  133. Re:Wrong again! by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    What "other dimensions" that we can't see? There are no other dimensions that we can prove. No version of string theory have been proven, but many versions have been proven to be false. It's neat science fiction, but it is not science fact.

    There are not other dimensions that we have proven yet. We may never do so, because they may not be there. But we don't know one way of the other yet, and I have never claimed otherwise.

    it's a hypothetical theory based on our inability to detect and measure what's around us

    No, stop being obtuse. It's based on what little we have been able to detect and measure. As we detect more and measure more, these theories will either find themselves further validated, or (much more interestingly) something which contradicts a theory will be discovered, at which point the theory will be modified or discarded.

    Yet numerous physicists and mathematicians have been working on models that don't require magical dimensions to show how the Universe has been expanding and working.

    Numerous alchemists spent years "working on" turning lead into gold and got nowhere.

    That's unfair to these physicists you refer to, of course, and is not meant to suggest they're wrong. It's good that people are working on different models - models which may well yet turn out to be correct. But do these theories explain our observations of the universe any better than string theory? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way - I'm specifically asking you, s.petry, to tell me how these theories compare to string theory and the like.

    When you treat a string of theories as factual

    I don't, and never have, as you well know. When you treat theories as certainly false without evidence of their falsity, then you're not acting scientifically.

    Read the work

    You first.

    this is their claim. "We used string theory to process a model and string theory gave us what string theory predicted."

    No, it isn't.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  134. Re:Wrong again! by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    So me questioning the theory based on logical points

    You're not questioning it, you're dismissing it. And you haven't presented any logical points, you've only claimed that such points exist (in a round-about sort of way).

    What do you call yourself for having that much belief that this theory is proven?

    The GP said no such thing. What is your problem with comprehending the written word?

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  135. Re:Wrong again! by s.petry · · Score: 1

    Seems like we are in more agreement than originally perceived.

    There are not other dimensions that we have proven yet. We may never do so, because they may not be there. But we don't know one way of the other yet, and I have never claimed otherwise.

    That was what I originally claimed, and why I claimed that this study was not factual or "evidence" as it was posted in TFA. Your argument was that this is evidence and fact originally, and that I was not a Nobel recipient so could not argue that it was all theory or against the theory.

    No, stop being obtuse. It's based on what little we have been able to detect and measure. As we detect more and measure more, these theories will either find themselves further validated, or (much more interestingly) something which contradicts a theory will be discovered, at which point the theory will be modified or discarded.

    There was no being obtuse, we stated the same thing with different extremes. Numerous versions of String Theory have been discarded, and what we have today is yet another modification trying to make it work. Claiming it's fact is wrong. Having an opinion that it shows promise or failure leads to rational discourse. Seems like we have moved in our dialogue more toward rational discourse so far.

    That's unfair to these physicists you refer to, of course, and is not meant to suggest they're wrong. It's good that people are working on different models - models which may well yet turn out to be correct. But do these theories explain our observations of the universe any better than string theory? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way - I'm specifically asking you, s.petry, to tell me how these theories compare to string theory and the like.

    It's unfair of the physicists and journal to sensationalize the theory as "evidence" and just as unfair for people to claim it's factual.

    Look, I think string theory is very interesting. It's made us look at things in ways we never thought to look for before. For example just last week, a nice paper was delivered discussing how Einstein's theories and Quantum entanglement were not out of line. It's a great theory from that regard.

    That said, when we look at our influence on particle beams we have two schools of thought for the solution. One, is that we have N dimensions, or alternatively we have another energy that we are not accounting for. The latter is a very rational area to pursue based on sound scientific principles. The first has become a math problem which goes further and further in trying to prove N dimensions. It's some nifty math, but it does not match our observable universe. The nifty math has shown that we can't yet account for everything, but it has not proven that we have N dimensions.

    And yes, these pieces of physics do represent our observable universe better than string theory. We can repeat results without tweaking theories and models. Where as String theory has been a constant stream of tweaking both input models and the theory.

    I don't, and never have, as you well know. When you treat theories as certainly false without evidence of their falsity, then you're not acting scientifically.

    And visa-verse. If you treat the theory as true you are not acting scientifically. My reaction and comments would be very different if people didn't make claims like "Evidence that the Universe is a Holographic representation", or "String theory is true" and "In our N dimensional Universe". Not that you stated all of those things, but you come close to a couple and at least implied that nobody could question the theory.

    this is their claim. "We used string theory to process a model and string theory gave us what string theory predicted."
    No, it isn't.

    I quoted the article to a different person below, perhaps you should give it another read.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  136. not pointwise in time? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My understanding of this theory is that the information about the universe is not encoded on the boundary of the universe (i.e. black hole boundaries) right now, but it is encoded on the boundary of the universe over all time, i.e. the boundaries of black holes for all times plus Big Bang plus maybe the Big Crunch if there is one. This means that if we had perfect information about all of these three boundaries of the universe (for all time, for the first) then we'd also know what happens inside the universe for all time.
    While this has a lot of theoretical interest, I'm not sure why it means that the universe is a hologram or anything like that.

  137. Re:Horseshit by sexconker · · Score: 1

    All 3D holograms can be stored in two dimensions. Stop "debunking" science you do not even begin to grasp the faintest notion of.

    Wrong. You cannot collapse a dimension without losing information.
    You either force a single perspective, meaning your resulting "projection" is not truly n+1 dimensional, or you store multiple copies from multiple perspectives, thus losing all other perspectives not stored. 2 perspectives (2 copies stored in 2D) gets you a resolution of 2 in the 3D plane, 100 gets you a resolution of 100. No matter how high you go, you've traded a continuous dimension for discrete steps.

  138. Re:Horseshit by sexconker · · Score: 1

    Actually, current thinking is that it is stored on the surface of an N-sphere.

    Thinking by who? Show me one fuck who thinks this, and I'll show you some jackass in Academia who likes palpating their own genitals and calling it research.
    Then get along and show me some fucking evidence that this wacky shit is true. There is exactly as much evidence to support the theory that the entire universe we see is actually just a mote of dust floating around some alien's underwear after ripping a hot dry fart.

  139. Re:Horseshit by sjames · · Score: 1

    Ooooooooooh, you CUSSED!

    You should watch that farting, you;'ll dry rot your underoos.

  140. 90% missing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Astro physicists have been complaining that there's an enormous part of the universe that should exist but they can't find, and this for ages. Now they're claiming it's a hologam? As far as I know a hologram has no mass. So there's no real universe at all. Instead of missing around 90% of it's mass, now it's missing 100%?
    But I think I exist, and if I think, I am. No,

  141. Genetic hologram theory as per palm print is true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The outcome of 2012 nobel prize in Physics Genetic hologram -Survival of Jesus Christ from negative mirror of Genetic Hologram

    Sankaravelayudhan Nandakumar Nandakumar
            9:07 AM (0 minutes ago)

    to astro

    The outcome of 2012 nobel prize in Physics Genetic hologram -Survival of Jesus Christ from negative mirror of Genetic Hologram

    Sankaravelayudhan Nandakumar Nandakumar

            8:49 AM (0 minutes ago)

    to rld, Hubble, s.w.hawking, Steve, science

    In physics, the ‘holographic principle’ is a property described in string theory. It represents a volume of space whose entire information can be imagined as encoded on a boundary of that selected space. The holographic principle started by first observing black hole thermodynamics. There, it was noticed that the informational content of all the objects that got sucked in by the hole can be seen in a scaled sense on the hole’s event Serge Haroche is a professor at the Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He shared the 8m-kronor prize with David J Wineland of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, Boulder. The citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said they won "for groundbreaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems" through reflective mirrors.But their works require further production of genetic hologram the transfer dynamics from negative mirror to positive mirror.
    Though it may look strange the outcome seems to be two positive and negative mirrors of human body that one survives even after death.The negative genetic mirror is always operative bring out the human bodty in full form in the form of genetic hologram.The Nobel laureates have seeded the point of rebirth even after death unknowingly.
    When two particles interact, they become "entangled," which means one particle affects the other at a distance. The connection lasts long after they are separated. Quantum mechanics predicts the bizarrest things. Tiny particles like electrons can simultaneously be in two places, or, more generally, in two states that would seem mutually exclusive in our everyday experience of physics. Similarly weirdly, particles that have once interacted can remain entangled even when they're moved far apart and then influence each other instantaneously, something which Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". These seemingly magical properties could be exploited for exciting real-world applications, if it wasn't for another strange consequence of quantum mechanics: that by simply looking at a quantum system you destroy many of its properties sound a way of trapping individual photons (particles of light) for a record-breaking amount of time. Using extremely reflective mirrors which bounce the photons back and forth,

    The real genetic hologram was that of Jesus Christ after his survival after death.
    Sankaravelyudhan Nandakumar,Astrogeneticist,Oxford and Cambridge astro,Hubble research Scholar

  142. Re:Genetic hologram theory as per palm print is tr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Out come of Nobel prize 2012
    The Nobel prize for physics 2012 has been awarded to two scientists who worked out a way to trap, manipulate and study the fundamental particles of light and matter without destroying them. Their work is a crucial step towards building superfast quantum computers and could lead to ways of measuring time with a hundred times greater precision than is possible using atomic clocks.
    When two particles interact, they become "entangled," which means one particle affects the other at a distance. The connection lasts long after they are separated. Quantum mechanics predicts the bizarrest things. Tiny particles like electrons can simultaneously be in two places, or, more generally, in two states that would seem mutually exclusive in our everyday experience of physics. Similarly weirdly, particles that have once interacted can remain entangled even when they're moved far apart and then influence each other instantaneously, something which Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". These seemingly magical properties could be exploited for exciting real-world applications, if it wasn't for another strange consequence of quantum mechanics: that by simply looking at a quantum system you destroy many of its properties sound a way of trapping individual photons (particles of light) for a record-breaking amount of time. Using extremely reflective mirrors which bounce the photons back and forth,
    Quantum mechanics operates, particles of matter can exist in multiple states—such as "on" and "off" to reference the binary process by which digital computing operates—at the same time. We may not be able to comprehend what this means outside of mathematics, but scientists have theorized for several decades that harnessing these properties for computing would be a natural way past the issues that loom for today's nanoscale silicon-based transistors, which are running up against atomic-level barriers to functionality the smaller they get. Today's computers use a binary code, in which data is stored in a bit that could be either zero or 1.
    Entanglement is a state where the state of two quantum particles (photons, for example) are intrinsically and absolutely linked. Quantum particles, due a principle called quantum superposition, exist in every theoretically possible state at the same time. A photon, for example, spins horizontally and vertically (different polarizations) at the same time. When you measure a quantum particle, though, it fixes on a single state. With entanglement, when you measure one half of the entangled pair, the other half instantly assumes the exact opposite state. If you measure one photon and it’s vertically polarized, its entangled sibling will be horizontally polarized.

    But in superposition, a quantum bit, known as a qubit, could be either zero or one, or both zero and one at the same time.This potentially offers a massive increase in data storage, greatly helping number-crunching tasks such as running climate-change models and breaking encrypted codes.
    They also allowed him to use quantum entanglement to trace how a quantum system changes from a state of superposition — being in two states at once — to the state of definite existence
    As we’ve covered before, entanglement seems to occur instantly, even if the particles are on opposite ends of the universe. This experiment shows how entanglement exists through time, as well as space — or, in scientific terms, the non-locality of quantum mechanics in spacetime
    The weird way entangled particles stay connected even when separated by large distances — a phenomenon Albert Einstein called "spooky" — has been confirmed once again, this time with a key loophole in the experiment eliminated.
    The results from the new experiment confirm one of the wildest predictions of quantum mechanics: that a pair of "entangled" particles, once measured, can somehow instantly communicate with each other so that their states always match.
    The implications were that individual ent

  143. Re:They're talking about the AdS/CFT corresondence by MooseMiester · · Score: 1

    Yes, and the other key point is that if you break that souvenir, the image is contained in every single piece. Once you get your head wrapped around that, the holographic theory of the Universe starts to make a little more sense.

    --
    Murphy was an optimist