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Controversial Experiment Sees No Evidence That the Universe Is a Hologram (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes in with bad news for Holographic Universe fans. From Sciencemag: "It's a classic underdog story: Working in a disused tunnel with a couple of lasers and a few mirrors, a plucky band of physicists dreamed up a way to test one of the wildest ideas in theoretical physics--a notion from the nearly inscrutable realm of "string theory" that our universe may be like an enormous hologram. However, science doesn't indulge sentimental favorites. After years of probing the fabric of spacetime for a signal of the "holographic principle," researchers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois have come up empty, as they will report tomorrow at the lab.
...tested their reality with cartoon equipment but failed to prove they were ink.
It doesn't seem like something that could be really tested. If it's all a simulation where we are not supposed to be aware we are a simulation, then it stands to reason any test that we do will fail to dig up something or else be readily explained by something else. I suppose it could be shown to be a simple explanation if they said 'overclock this region of space' and weird things happened (though even then, someone could say it's God having fun in real reality rather than an admin having fun with simulated reality).
It stands to reason that such a theory could be the basis of a faith, but it's not a scientifically testable thing. It could be true, could be false, but we have no way of knowing. Just like which and if any religious faith is correct.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Occam's razor is not science. It's just a quick gut feeling rule to separate what's probable from what's improbable.
According to Occam's razor, quantum physics would be pretty improbable too.
Very, very wrong. While Occam's Razor can be abused to justify Reductionism, it is not Reductionism in itself. It merely is the fundamental scientific principle that one should look at (and prove or disprove) simple explanations first in order to be efficient. It leads to other derived sound scientific principles, for example "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", which serves to reduce scientific fraud and errors.
Science is not just hard facts. Science is a mind-set, and a set of approaches and principles on how to arrive at hard facts. And sometimes it is soft facts, because nothing better can be obtained with the resources available.
Deal with it and stop misusing "Science!" as a surrogate religion. That violates the idea of science and leads to bad scientific practices.
Example soft fact: "God does almost certainly not exist. [Dawnkins]" That is science. The hard statement "God does not exist" is not scientifically viable and qualifies only as religion as there is now way to prove that. It is still a very reasonable assumption (but only that), and the main way to arrive at it is by a variation of Occam's Razor: "If all simple ways to prove a claim up to a certain, reasonably high complexity level have been exhausted without result, it is reasonable to assume the claim is almost certainly untrue." As Quantum mechanics show, "reasonable high complexity" depends on the circumstances and can be very high in practice.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.