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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 word "theory" implies that it is testable.
"Falsifiable" is a better word here. You don't need to be able to do controlled experiments (tests) in order to have a solid theory - an influx of new observations of the universe as we find it works just as well.
And the holographic principle is certainly falsifiable.
1) It imposes a limit on the amount of entropy in any given volume - find a system which can be in more than the allowed number of states, and isn't inside a black hole, and this theory is dead.
2) It sets a really high value on the entropy of black holes. Black holes become the dominant source of entropy in our universe. This has consequences in cosmology that are fundamental, if the only reason entropy is increasing in our universe is this assigning of entropy to black holes. There are certainly physicists playing with that idea, as it could be career-making, true or false.
3) It has deep implications for the evolution of black holes - how they evaporate. This will be a lot harder to prove (I don't think we'll validate Hawking radiation in my lifetime), but might be possible to falsify by finding a black hole that's clearly not allowed by theory.
Heck, there are implications for particle physics that are still being understood, and lots there is testable now with the LHC. The more and farther you reason from a premise like this, the more likely it is to matter to something easy to measure, or at least possible to measure.
The reason the discovery of the Higgs boson was such a big deal is that it confirmed a bunch of really abstract theory in quantum mechanics that is very, very far from anything we can measure, except at the end of this very long chain of reasoning there's this prediction of this new oddball particle (that there's no other reason to expect - it come from deep in the abstract math of QM, not from anything else we measured). So finding that particle confirms that whole crazy chain of logic. Something similar will eventually happen for the holographic principle.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Just about any dimensional space can be represented in fewer dimensions, or even 1 dimension
But that all misses the point here. The point of the holographic principle is not that one can imagine a 3D encoding onto a 2D surface, e.g. a holograph, but that the maximum possible information in a volume is not proportional to volume, but to surface area. That implies the fundamental mechanics of the universe can't be something like "voxels". We observe a universe which we can measure in 3 spatial dimension down to the Plank length, in principle, but that can't be what's really going on, at least if the holographic principle holds.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Dimension" is a perspective, a human artifact. The universe doesn't classify itself. 3D space as we perceive it may just be a useful lie to ourselves--a handy model but only an approximate model. We can throw in time and think of our world as 4D, but that doesn't mean that time is or is not a "dimension". It's only a perspective or model we can choose to use or not.
For a simpler version of this, imagine a 2D world where each time "slice" is stacked onto each other kind of like really thin pancakes from OUR perspective; we are given a God view. The higher we go in the stack, the more recent the time of their world. It's kind of like a flip-book, except it may be continuous instead of discrete pages.
We could cut into and study the pancakes to observe any time of this 2D world we want. But to the inhabitants of the 2D world, only the currently active "slice" (the present) is all they are capable of influencing and directly observing, outside of memories. It's just like our limited relationship with time.
We don't know what the "right" perspective is of our universe or if there even is ONE "right" one. There are only relationships (such as relationships between particles). How one chooses to perceive or project or represent these relationships is ultimately arbitrary.
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