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Holographic Principle Could Apply To Our Universe
New submitter citpyrc sends this news from the Vienna University of Technology: The "holographic principle" asserts that a mathematical description of the universe actually requires one fewer dimension than it seems. What we perceive as three dimensional may just be the image of two dimensional processes on a huge cosmic horizon. Up until now, this principle has only been studied in exotic spaces with negative curvature. This is interesting from a theoretical point of view, but such spaces are quite different from the space in our own universe. Results obtained by scientists at Vienna (abstract) now suggest that the holographic principle even holds in a flat spacetime, like ours.
The holographic universe theory has been around for at least 25+ years
When you have famous astronomers and people such as
* "The stuff of the universe is mind-stuff" - Astronomer Arthur Eddington
* "... our brains mathematically construct hard reality by interpreting frequencies from a dimension transcending time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe." - Cyberneticist David Foster
* "Today there is a wide measure of agreement... that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine" - Astronomer James Jeans
saying the universe appears to function like a holographic mind then I find ANY sort of calculations that can give credence to this theory is definitely interesting.
The word "theory" implies that it is testable. But the mental fabrication of the Holographic Universe already admits to its untestable nature. But it continues to witlessly push forward on the assumption that the proponents could win the argument (grant money) if it could sell enough books and achieve mainstream popularity.
theory (countable and uncountable, plural theories) -
(sciences) A coherent statement or set of ideas that explains observed facts or phenomena, or which sets out the laws and principles of something known or observed; a hypothesis confirmed by observation, experiment etc.
hypothesis (plural hypotheses) -
(sciences) Used loosely, a tentative conjecture explaining an observation, phenomenon or scientific problem that can be tested by further observation, investigation and/or experimentation.
I for one don't want to give Physics research a blank check to investigate some unobservable math fantasy.
Tits exist in at least Four Dimensions.
I've found that over time, they extend their vertical dimension in a much larger proportion than the loss to the original horizontal dimension...
Entropy causes Sagging, film at 11.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Sure. I don't work in physics, but here is my understanding of the holographic principle.
Imagine that you are in a bathtub. There is a certain kind of physics that dictates the motions of waves in the bathtub. Now, you might believe that you need to understand the entirety of water to predict its future motion. You could develop a theory of water in bathtubs, and run experiments to verify if they are true.
After a lot of thought, you might come across the realization that in order to understand the mechanics of the water in the bathtub, it is only necessary to understand the way the surface of the water moves, or maybe even how the water interacts with the edge of the bathtub. This means that you've reduced the dimension of your theory in some way. While this analogy isn't true, there are examples of where it is-- for instance, the physics of harmonic oscillators, like strings, drumheads, etc, can be understood by looking at the boundaries of those oscillations.
Now, in physics, there are several ways that holography shows up. The most famous of these holography theories is called the AdS/CFT correspondence. It conjectures that a certain 5 dimensional string theory can be understood as a 4 dimensional field theory on the boundary. Now, I think that this perspective is interesting to physicists not because of the dimension change (dimensions in theoretical physics usually have little correlation with the observable dimensions of spacetime) but because it was one of the first known correspondences where a string theory reproduced the results of a field theory. Quantum Field theory is the most validated theory of physics we have, but it is thought to have foundational errors. String theory is suppose to offer a way out, but is... hard.
Hope that helps!