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Fermilab Begins Testing Holographic Universe Theory
Back in 2009, researchers theorized that space could be a hologram. Four years ago, Fermilab proposed testing the theory, and the experiment is finally going online. Jason Koebler writes Operating with cutting-edge technology out of a trailer in rural Illinois, government researchers started today on a set of experiments that they say will help them determine whether or not you and me and everything that exists are living in a two-dimensional holographic universe. In a paper explaining the theory, Craig Hogan, director of the Department of Energy's Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics writes that "some properties of space and time that seem fundamental, including localization [where things are], may actually emerge only as a macroscopic approximation from the flow of information in a quantum system." In other words, the location of places in space may constantly fluctuate ever so slightly, which would suggest we're living in a hologram.
The instant we realize it's all an experiment or simulation, the flip will be switched off.
Why? I guess at that point observing us will get actually interesting. Assuming there is an observer. Even if this is all a simulation there might, or might not be an observer. Also, if you assume a simulation, is everyone else also simulated as having a "free will". Does "I think, therefore I am" actually mean anything? If this is all a simulation, how do I know if the people around me are simulated as their own entities or as part of the background? Does it even matter? Am I part of the background for observing someone else? Is life and planet earth just an anomaly in some holographic "heu lets invent some basic rules and see what happens" experiment? What if they are actually observing blackholes, and life just keeps popping out in every damn simulation, like some bacteria on a dirty petri dish?
So if we're all photonic organisms who think we are biological carbon based then I'm going to get ready for the invasion by Chaotica's forces.
Here's to you Captain Proton. *Raises a beer*
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
End program.
Wow the Europeans confirming the existence of the Higgs Boson and then ramping up the LHC power output has really stung the American Physics community into action. First they put on a dog and pony show about "Hints of Physics beyond the Standard Model" last week, and now this crap? Why is it that we feel we must hold up fanciful speculation as some sort of achievement? In Europe they get results, here we just publish fantasy and partial fact dressed up as wondrous discovery and pat ourselves on the back and hey we might even get on CNN if its "Star Trek" enough.
How about doing real some science guys, like the egg-heads in Europe do?
Oh good can we all play this game? I theorise the answer to life, the universe and everything might be 42, but I need an enormous amount of public money to build the computer to simulate it properly. Anyone else?
You?
Somehow I doubt that.
Tell your congresscritter that they need to improve science funding. Oh, I forgot, taxes are bad and we need to eliminate "big Goverment", not that it does anything now anyway. God forbid that education and infrastructure get what they need to work properly, much less "hard science". Go ahead, flame away if you want. Doesn't mean you're any less selfish. "I want to keep mine and you can go pound sand".
Idiots.
Ok, so let's say experiment confirms that we live in holographic universe. And then what?
"Computer, End program."
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Document its API, what else?
NT
"The location of places in space", that's a funny sentence.
Scientists in a trailer in rural Illinois have just discovered that the world is indeed flat. Thus bringing an end to the several hundred year old scientific debate.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory, which states that this has already happened.
So are they postulating that even non-matter has motion?
They better find the bugzilla, there are graphics issues in the production release and a series of UI changes need to be made.
More importantly, what do we do if we're written in a programming language we don't like? Maybe we get cancer because the universe was written in PHP.
This is what happens when physicists come up with ideas when they're high, and remember to write them down before coming down.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The area around Fermilab hasn't been rural for at least 20 years, suburbia crept up and surrounded it. It was a rural area, when first built.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
IF I'm Virtual, what language am I? What os? Pray tell that I'm not a visual basic program running on windows. But then that would explain allot!
Operating with cutting-edge technology out of a trailer in rural Illinois....Me and Dr. Bubba J will test ... whether the Universe is a flat course and always turning to the left.
Out of a TRAILER????
I think they should have just left it as "Operating with cutting-edge technology...." and left out the "trailer" part.
1) even assuming we are holograms, how do they know the imperfections are not simulated
2) even if the experiment comes with results that confirm it, an irregularity does not mean we are holograms, it could simply mean some theories about the universe are adjusted
3) Even supposing for a moment that we live in a simulated universe, what the heck are you going to do about it? ask for a refund? ask for a change in the simulation?
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
You're my only hope.
In special relativity, we find out that our velocity through spacetime is actually constant. If you move though space faster, you necessarily move through time more slowly.
So I'm wondering if information about particles is somehow limited to a specific amount of information. If you have more bits of precision about one thing, then the certainty about some other property is necessarily weaker because it doesn't get as many of the total number of bits something can have. Can we work out the number of bits? We need bits for position, bits for momentum, bits for other quantum mechanical properties, etc.
I'm wondering if perhaps superposition is a result of the number of bits for a given property (like spin) going to zero because they were required to increase the precision of something else. For that matter, I wonder if particles can share/trade bits, so that sometimes particles have no bits (like when they get absorbed). And maybe a body made up of particles has bits shared kinda like how a metal's conduction band is shared among all the atoms. Maybe that is the way force carriers act... trading bits. MAYBE the whole universe simply has a total number of bits, which are divided up as necessarily among the particles. And really particle interactions are just bits (and their values) being traded around within a vast amorphous ocean of bits. In that case, particles are an illusion; they're an emergent property (from our perspective) of the varying association among bits.
Upon reading the research summary, I don't see anywhere where it implies that we are in a simulation. I think they are just proposing that the fundamental construction of reality is 2D but is ultimately 'projected' as 3D due to quantum effect. At least that is the way I interpret this, I could be wrong though.
out of a trailer in rural Illinois
the location of places in space may constantly fluctuate ever so slightly, which would suggest we're living in a hologram.
I present a new theory: It is actually the graymatter between the ears that is constantly fluctuating in space and time.
Ok, I don't have the time to RTFA right now but isn't this completely obvious? Nuclei, atoms, molecules all vibrate (if not more) all the time. From the macroscopic point of view these all are so tiny as to be an insignificant error in any measurement of location but none the less, the "error" does exist.
In the mean time, they managed to cook the purest batch of meth yet known to men.
Since the idea is that this universe is a simulation, who says it is a simulation of reality? Maybe we are some kids crazy fantasy world in which the container has to be larger then its contents! FREAKY!
The trick to thinking outside the box, is to stop thinking the box is real.
IF this is a simulated world, there is no reason to assume the rules in the simulation are the same as the ones of the world in which the simulation is running.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I do believe this research may actually yield some surprises, but it doesn't necessarily mean that "location fluctuations" would mean we are living in a 2D holographic projection. I believe it is the opposite of that; we are living in a 12 dimensional universe that we experience as 4 Dimensional (time is the 4th property). The Higgs Boson and Dark matter are artifacts of space/time itself existing in a 4 Dimensional space we don't directly interact with.
Location can be manipulated and is influenced by a higher dimension -- so there will be measurable uncertainty, but it can prove the INVERSE of this hypothesis; we are the result of a higher dimension experienced as 4.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
And it's a waste.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
All frozen...
There's a lot of confusion about what this means, but to be clear: this has nothing to do with ghostly 3D things floating in a surrounding room.
What it's saying is that the 3D nature of the universe might be only approximate. Let's say you (somehow) come up with a two-dimensional universe and physical laws, in which you can mostly accurately (but not completely) calculate the ongoing evolution of a 3D universe. The "mostly accurately" part translates into a slight blurriness, a fuzziness of the 3D world, but it occurs at such small scales that nobody will notice.
Such models have been created theoretically - not long ago some bright spark concocted a ten-dimensional universe that had relativity and spatial deformations and whatnot, but which was mathematically equivalent to a one-dimensional universe that did not.
This experiment is looking for the blurriness.
Now, the story of how this got started is fascinating. Some other bright spark was investigating entropy (chaos), and in particular was interested in the maximum amount of chaos that could be contained in a three-dimensional volume. In a sense, this is like asking the maximum information density of a volume.
Somewhat bizarrely, the equation for the maximum entropy is proportional to the surface area of the volume. This is really weird, and important. The maximum amount of information you can cram into a space is limited by the space's surface area, not its volume.
The implication of this is that you could characterize the entire state of a 3D volume with a membrane. This has been proposed as one solution to the black hole information paradox - black holes are a place of no return, and so they seem to violate the law that information (like energy) can't be created or destroyed. The solution is this: as particles enter the black hole, you get tiny peturbations (bulges, dimples, ripples) in the black hole's event horizon. The idea is that the entire state of that particle retained in these peturbations as they play across the event horizon. The information isn't lost, it's just encoded in this 2D form.
This leads to the startling idea that the peturbations as they evolve are actually modelling the ongoing state of the interior of the black hole. Modelling.. calculating.. simulating. The peturbations on the event horizon are a 2D calculation of the state of a 3D volume.
This is the holographic theory - what if our entire universe, despite its apparent 3D nature, were in fact equivalent to a 2D simulation.
If I were going to write a universe simulator, It would probably start at the big bang - then as the universe spread out, it would only do real calculations on certain "frames" of the universe that mattered. The real way to test that would be to send an object outside the frame... The simulation would GPF I suppose.
Back in 2009, researchers theorized that space could be a hologram.
The idea is older than that. From the very link, they "bolster[ed] the proposition" - they didn't come up with the idea.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This whole simulation thing only works apparently when you've got computers around. So what were people thinking before computers existed? And IMHO, the whole simulation thing is HOKUM. Even if I was a super advanced posthuman, why the crap would I bother simulating something that the posthumans were trying to get away from?
Is this lab following the Dead (or Phish or others) around the country? "...and it seems like all this life was just a dream...Stella Blue."
Dammit!
It's the seventh time humans finish with an armageddon.
I'm tired to reinstall the Heaven backup.
Next time I will try to fill Earth with smart dogs. These bald monkeys always takes the wrong path.
On May 25, 1988 the universe was revealed as a construct in the mind of Tommy Westphall.
Anyone willing to consider that 3D space is an illusion really needs to look into reading the new book Time Reborn by Lee Smolin.
If these experiments confirm that we are in fact all actors of a holodeck, can they publish the results to the general public ?
Hey didja ever think what if we were actually living in a holodeck and didn't know it?
Woww! You're totally blowin' my mind, man.
I've been on Slashdot for many years now and I'm just starting to finally get tired of the general level of complete idiocy of most posters here. Am I getting old or is the internet population at large just getting dumber? Not sure.
145 posts and no one has made the single-word "Whoa" post in reference to Neo from The Matrix.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
...if we are all Jem and the Holograms.
therefore....holograms.
Operating with cutting-edge technology out of a trailer in rural Illinois...
They'll more likely come to the conclusion that the universe is 16 years old and pregnant.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
FWIW. Simulacron-3 (1964) (also published as Counterfeit World), by Daniel F. Galouye, is an American science fiction novel featuring an early literary description of virtual reality.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
I'm sorry. I must have dozed off.
I always assumed this was a journalistic misunderstanding. There is absolutely no point in performing this experiment. Come on...The universe is not a hologram. General Relativity pretty much rules this out, does it not?
'Simulation' is simply a recent metaphor that sounds cool and high-tech.
In earlier times, people would have been talking about whether the universe was really a telephone switchboard or a clock.
The universe, and everything in it, including ourselves, doesn't become less (or more) real because we find some math connecting a N-dimensional representation of the universe and an N'-dimensional representation.
It was mentioned in the game Mass Effect 3. I figured it was just technobabble ... guess not.
Try 1996 - that's when Michael Talbot's book, "The Holographic Universe" was published and discusses physicist David Bohm's theory at length.
no they both age the same only one is very far away
dont let your imagination build lies
one second is one second
Actually, in all seriousness, I've been thinking about that for years: what would cracking/hacking the universe look like?
The answer I came up with: magick, as well as ghosts and what-not--why else do such things interact with reality in random ways, be impossible to study with the Scientific Method, yet also be impossible to completely discount?
That is, Hogwarts is a school for reality crackers!
Lets say tomorrow it was proven that the universe is just a hologram, would this change anything for any of us?
Dude, I have zero idea what you were talking about but you blew my mind apart...
So, Plato was right!
After they run these experiments the scientists who came up with that theory are going to discover something. Their discovery is likely not going to at all be what they expected and several of them might spend the rest of their lives attempting to disprove what they find. We'll see a mirroring of the old quantum mechanics experimentation regarding irregularities in photon and electron behaviors where these charged particles do bizarre things such as wildly change behaviors when they are being directly observed to when they are being passively observed.
Already explained in "The Thirteenth Floor", 1999. Columbia Pictures. Or read Simulacron-3 (1964), a novel by Daniel F. Galouye.
I am curious. If you're within a holographic simulation and you're testing if you're in a holographic simulation, I wonder what the results will be....
(Dog sees tail - HEY - I see something following me what is that, it's a tail I wonder where it leads. Hey.. what is that following me... i see something)...
Sub;
Origins-universe-Knowledge Base
-See Scientific Edge on culture-Interlinks Manasa Sarovar at Himalayas to orion nebula -1400 Light years. this is space data confirmatory Index
Let chicago-groups start East West Interaction in earnestness.
the Invisible-Visible Matrix for the Universe helps advancement-
see Cosmology Vedas Interlinks-Vidyardhi Nanduri