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.

Comments

absence of evidence

[turkeydance]

and all that

Re:absence of evidence

[Opportunist]

Occam's Razor and all that.

Re:absence of evidence

[Spacelord]

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.

Re:absence of evidence

[Bengie]

But according to quantum physics, improbable things can still happen.

Re:absence of evidence

[arth1]

Occam's razor is not science. It's just a quick gut feeling rule to separate what's probable from what's improbable.

What Occam's Razor says it that we should not introduce complexities where none are necessary. It does not deal with probabilities, only complexity vs simplicity.

You can use Occam's Razor as an aid to guess relative probabilities when data is incomplete, but once you've done that Occam's Razor no longer comes into play. It won't say that the least probable should be discarded. Eliminating improbables is more in Christiaan Huygens' realm than Willem of Ockham's.

Re:absence of evidence

[taylorius]

How do you define simplicity when we don't really know how something works at all? Is a holographic universe simpler or more complex than some other alternative?

Re:absence of evidence

[Faust6]

This

Re:absence of evidence

[serviscope_minor]

According to Occam's razor, quantum physics would be pretty improbable too.

Not really. There aren't any theories other than quantum mechanics which explain observable phenomena like the double slit experiment, photoelectric effect and the success of the technique in predicting all sorts of other things.

Re:absence of evidence

[oh_my_080980980]

You apparently do know what Occam's razor means...

Re:absence of evidence

[Oligonicella]

"Occam's razor is not science." Neither is absence of evidence.

Re:absence of evidence

[gweihir]

While Occam's Razor is decidedly a good scientific principle, it cannot be used to prove anything. It is most useful for formulating hypotheses and prioritizing competing research directions.

Re:absence of evidence

[gweihir]

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.

Re:absence of evidence

[gweihir]

Not only according to Quantum Mechanics. There are millions of people that play the lottery. And you know what, some even win! It is still a gross waste of money to do so, but countless people that do not understand probabilities do not realize that.

Re:absence of evidence

[gweihir]

Simplicity is not definable. It is a judgment call, i.e. it requires an intelligent and wise person to make the determination. Most people do not qualify as either. (Yes, that is a judgment call as well...)

Re:absence of evidence

[bluefoxlucid]

You want to work in both directions. Engineers use the reduced set; scientists use the expanded set. I'm aware of and use both because it gives me another way to be outside of every system: I can be a broad-scope thinker or a narrow-scope thinker at any given time, and even simultaneously (I can also hold both aspects of a Necker Cube in my head at once in the same geometric space--conjectured in the weakest form to be neurologically impossible for humans, but nobody has ever done serious research about that kind of cognition and the conjecture is roughly equivalent in nature to Alcubierre's conjecture about folding space by applying negative energy if such a thing exists).

Being inside a system makes you blind to the system's working. Experts don't make great advances in their field; they make great experiments in the field they study--and, frequently, in fields they don't study.

Teachers are technically incapable of improving education because of the noise in the line: they're exposed to the reinforcing results of taking action and observing outcomes, and so bias toward short-term responses instead of long-term results. That's usually good (it's how you generate expertise), but it only works for short-term results: you're getting feedback immediately, not feedback about the eventual long-term consequence. When you play piano, paint, perform mathematics, build furniture, or whatnot, the immediate result *is* the final result: typographical errors are forever errors, and that stuff you delete and retype affects your final typing speed, and so avoiding those errors improves your final typing speed and error rate.

We have statistics and the scientific method so we can try to understand long-term movements. This isn't great for humans. On the other hand, outside observers have less reinforcement from short-term observations: they're less invested in minor outcomes, and can observe the patterns and the system over time. They start simulating internally, predicting the outcomes without predicting their own responses--a teacher responds to a student becoming easy to manage or reciting correctly, but an observer respond to the long-term observation of learning rates in general--and make conjectures and predictions about changes. They then tweak, observe, and respond to the impacts of those long-term projections. It's less efficient than expertise development, but it accomplishes goals which require more long-term feedback.

Occam's razor and reductionism in general are like cognitive mip mapping: you can do less and get more broad data. I can simulate the whole damn universe in my head trivially; in the major sense, I can use my limited facilities on gross scale, because I know how big pieces of the system interact. I go back and fill in the details when I hit interesting states, then take samples of the minor effects. That's how I learned basically everything about economics before I started studying what others had written on economics--and started correcting their models. A lot of what everyone's come up with is *very* close, and itself behaves as a simplification or reduction of a larger, more complete theory which consistently produces more accurate results.

These are all tools. If you can be a part of any system at any time, you can be a part of no system, and thus exclude yourself from integration bias. I don't integrate that with any educational plans because I haven't been able to predict the degree to which this will make people... well, like me. At this point, I'm hardly a human being anymore, in the philosophical sense; I'm a conscious automaton. When people die, I simply discard them--any imperative I have invested in their well-being is immediately invalidated because a corpse is not a person. I *think*, however, that this is just a personality disorder; a person using the same facilities I use should, in theory, have their own will and desires and prerogatives, and slip readily into whatever feelings comfort them, and thus still function as a normal human being.

Re: absence of evidence

[master_p]

"God does not exist" can easily be proven:

One can not be omnipresent and omnipotent at the same time.

If he is omnipresent, then there is no room for creating anything, thus he is not omnipotent.

If he is omnipotent, then he can create things, but he is not omnipresent, because he wasn't occupying the space its creation did.

One can also not extend his own space to create something, because in that case he is not omnipresent in respect to the space he was in.

Therefore, there is no God.

However, this does not mean there are no creators of this universe, but they certainly aren't Gods in the biblical sense.

Re:absence of evidence

[bluefoxlucid]

Actually, from a risk standpoint, it's a good investment.

Every time you spend $12 at Taco Bell, that's a gross waste of money. The time expended to drive to Taco Bell just to eat bad food is higher than the time expended to prepare your own food. I live a 5 minute walk from a McDonalds, and I can prepare an Egg McMuffin at home in under 10 minutes using better food, for cheaper. Even if I drive, it's still 4-5 minutes there, 4-5 minutes back, and anywhere from 3-10 minutes in the drive thru, depending on the rush; if the McDonalds were further away, it'd be nearly an hour wasted; and even hitting McDonalds on the way to work is a 20 minute detour, whereas I can put together a sandwich in 6 minutes (the actual cook time is 5).

Cooking takes some up-front investment in time and materials, and then becomes very time-efficient once you've developed the skill. More time-efficient than a trip to the nearest Burger King. It also costs half as much at worst, down as low as 10% as much in some cases; operating a restaurant is expensive as fuck.

Playing the lottery, on the other hand, costs even less than that. You can play for as little as two dollars. If you lose, you lose two dollars; if you win, you win hundreds of millions. The actual invested amount is trivial, and the risk of loss is nearly 100%: you could lose nearly 100% of every $2 you put in. Even investing in cooking is worse: some of those pots cost $100, a good knife will run $30 plus an $80 sharpening stone or just $100 for an already-sharp knife (and eventually you want the stone), and you're going to put in a lot of time and stock perishable ingredients you'll never get around to using because your judgment is poor. If you don't develop a successful cooking routine, you'll never recover the time cost, and you'll invest hundreds of dollars in a few months at nearly 100% loss.

The probability for return in cooking is better. Call it even 30%--you're 70% likely to be too fucking lazy to really learn to cook--and the $500 invested is a risk of $350. If you went out and bought $500 of lottery tickets, your probability of winning wouldn't increase appreciably; your risk of loss would be nearly $500. Further, if you try to learn to cook later, you have a lot of reusable equipment, so the repeat risk is much lower.

If you buy just one ticket for every weekly drawing, that's $104/year. Probability of loss is $104/year, which is tiny. Repeatedly failing to learn to cook will eat up several tens of dollars of ingredients you never bothered preparing--bought a bunch of stuff, put it in the refrigerator, "will make lunch and dinner this week", instead went to mcdonalds, $40 of food went bad this week.

The pay-out for learning to cook is roughly a permanent cutback of 50% to 80% of your expenses and a return in time. The pay-out for the lottery, if it ever happens, is hundreds of millions of dollars.

Probability is one thing, but this is risk. The cost of this risk is *way* below most people's risk threshold: it's $104/year. It's $2/week. You have an opportunity to suddenly be a deca- or centa-millionaire; the four actions are exploit, enhance, share, and accept. In this case, "Accept" is actually "Accept that it won't happen", because the probability with zero action is 0%! "Share" is to go into a lottery pool with your friends, so if you win $300 million everyone gets $30 million. You enhance the opportunity every time you buy an additional lottery ticket, but it's not by much.

By far, your best single-return option is to buy exactly one random, active ticket every round. The difference between 0 and baseline is drastic; the difference between baseline and twice baseline is not. Your best overall strategy is to share: a lottery pool brings additional investment, sharing the cost of risk while also sharing the benefit. Anyone wins the lottery pool, the difference between baseline and pool is actually significant, and the difference between zero return and pool return is big. That sou

Re: absence of evidence

[qeveren]

Er... if he's omnipotent, then he can create something in the space that he already occupies (or vice versa)... because he's omnipotent.

Re: absence of evidence

[micahraleigh]

The existence question doesn't really concern me very much. If I'm on my death bed and find out I got that wrong ... meh.

My question: what if I took no notice upon the care he has for me?

One is an academic failure. The other is a life failure.

Re:absence of evidence

[taylorius]

I suppose that's the point I was making. The grandparent quoted Occam's Razor - but I don't think it really applies when you don't really know what the other available possibilities are.

Re:absence of evidence

[gweihir]

There seems to be something wrong with your brain.

Re: absence of evidence

[gweihir]

Seriously, you failed logic 101. The most basic thing is that logic cannot be applied to anything outside of a give axiom system.

You really are doing it wrong. What you claim is belief, not science and hence religion.

Re:absence of evidence

[bluefoxlucid]

Schizoid personality disorder. I don't develop affection for people.

That does give me a lot of time to think about everything else, though. No relationships, lots of economics. You find out a lot of interesting things when you read the financial and economic history of society.

Re: absence of evidence

[mcswell]

1) The Bible, at least, never uses those terms (I don't know about other religions). 2) It's not clear that God takes up space; or putting it differently, that being omnipresent involves being in space. Look at it this way: if you're watching (or even playing) a video game which involves a simulated landscape, how many pixels do you occupy in that landscape?

Re:absence of evidence

[gweihir]

Not talking about that. Your logic is broken and your statistics as well.

Re:absence of evidence

[Pseudonym]

Occam's razor is not science.

No, Occam's razor is a theorem in Bayesian model fitting. Here's a pretty good introduction.

Re: absence of evidence

[Pseudonym]

One can not be omnipresent and omnipotent at the same time.

You have not disproven the existence of any gods, you have merely reduced the viable search space. And you certainly haven't disproven the existence any gods "in the biblical sense"; the classical "omnis" are Greek, not Hebrew, and as such you won't find them listed (let alone used as some kind of definition) in the Bible. See open theism for one example.

As it happens, it's almost trivially easy to prove that some gods exist. The Roman cult of Sol Invictus worshipped the unconquered Sun. The Sun was, by any reasonable definition of the word "god", their god. Moreover, the Sun, by any reasonable scientific test you care to name, exists. Therefore at least one god exists. QED

If this sounds like semantic wordplay, it's no worse than what you just did. But on a more serious note, the interesting question isn't whether or not a god "exists" (since philosophical concepts "exist" in some sense), but whether or not the set of properties claimed of that god are true or not. And even then, it depends on who is doing the claiming as to precisely what is claimed.

Re:absence of evidence

[Pseudonym]

People who reject the Occam's Razor theorem are attempting to push a religious agenda, [...]

...which is ironic, when you consider who William of Ockham was.

Re:absence of evidence

[bluefoxlucid]

Risk is about probabilities and outcomes, not statistics. It's about saying, "Hmm, there's a 1 in 10,000 rate of contraction of HIV if I have sex with an HIV+ person, and about 0.2% of the world population has HIV; there's approximately 0 chance I'll contract HIV by unprotected sex. HIV would be life-destroying, so I should use a condom." The raw statistics say using condoms is a waste of time and money; we have birth control and abortion. The risk analysis says otherwise.

My logic is fine. Your understanding of risk analysis is poor.

Re: absence of evidence

[Maritz]

You're right that there's no God, but I find the argument here quite weak. Gravitation is omnipresent but there is plenty of room for things. Next. ;)

Re: absence of evidence

[Maritz]

Yes. The maximum information you can have inside a given volume is proportional to that volume's surface area in planck units. This can be generalised to any volume of space or if there is more than a certain amount of stuff in there, to black holes. I don't think it's particularly controversial, the math is simple enough even for me to understand. The big inference from this is that the universe is pixellated and not voxellated.

Well, that's good news . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I always thought those Holodeck episodes on Star Trek really sucked.

But on the other hand, when I look at the world today . . . a cheesy Holodeck episode would be a welcome change from this reality . . .

Re:Well, that's good news . . .

[minkowski76]

Have you ever called out "computer, end program", just to see if the (simulated) universe would disappear?

Re:Well, that's good news . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Yeah, I tried that. But this creepy little guy with huge ears showed up, and informed me that I was booked for life, and there was no way out of the contract . . .

The cartoon characters...

[Anonymous Coward]

...tested their reality with cartoon equipment but failed to prove they were ink.

Like testing for 'god'

[Junta]

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.

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[Jamu]

Hologram, not simulation.

Re: Like testing for 'god'

[bill_mcgonigle]

The original problem, IIRC, started with a Polish gravity wave experiment where they found noise signal below 10^-27 or so, when they shouldn't have seen one before the Plank length. It just so happened to be at the resolution no simulation would need to exceed and the detected noise matches up with a predicted signal from the Holographic model.

We'll see what they actuality report, but to your point, think in terms of hidden line removal rather than overclocking.

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[towermac]

Interesting. As in, anything that proved the existence of God would also prove that he is not God.

So, 'if' they were able to prove the holographic theory, wouldn't that also prove that the universe doesn't exist?

Ouch...

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[dinfinity]

Yes, if I understand it correctly, the idea is that a holographic universe has a 2-dimensional (spatial) substrate and has a vastly lower potential information content than one with a 3-dimensional substrate, which means that a 3-dimensional projection of a 2-dimensional substrate (which is what our universe would be if the holographic principle holds) has to 'cut corners' in some way.

I have to say that I'm not sure if we are advanced enough to detect such cutting of corners. In fact, given that we are still pretty much stuck on our home planet and trying to solve a number of issues trivial on a universal scale, I think we are not advanced enough.

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[Snotnose]

if they said 'overclock this region of space' and weird things happened

Just think if the alien nerds hotswapped their graphics card. Compare our graphics cards now with those of 10 years ago. Now think of where they'll be in 13 billion years. I'm guessing at least 4k @ 120fps with everything turned on, minimum.

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[jandersen]

...a simulation where we are not supposed to be aware we are a simulation...

You are reading too much into the words 'holographic', I think. As far as I can guess, the word is used as a metaphor for a model that is somewhat like how we understand holograms to work; there is nothing in the theories that implies the existence of somebody or something running something like computer program. However, all proper theories make predictions that can, at least in principle, be tested and falsified.

Whether God, if such a thing exists, would play silly games just to piss around with its creation seems far-fetched.

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[taylorius]

"Whether God, if such a thing exists, would play silly games just to piss around with its creation seems far-fetched."

Of course not - I'm sure god would NEVER play around with his simulation, yanking our chains just to see what we'll do. That doesn't sound plausible at all..

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[Jason Levine]

Don't worry. If they prove that the Universe is a hologram then it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more and inexplicable. In fact, some think that this has already happened.

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[Oligonicella]

Explain the difference.

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[thinkwaitfast]

This was Gödel's problem/insight.

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[KGIII]

Come to think of it, where I a god (it turns out that I am not), I'd be poking buttons to screw with people all the time. I've played some of those SIM type of games. No, you don't want me to be a god. Man, you don't even want me left in a room with a world-destroyer button that says, "DO NOT PUSH!" And that's just one button!

Either way, isn't pretty much the entire Bible predicated on God fucking with people? Aren't pretty much all of man's gods quite expressly fucking with us?

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[penguinoid]

You're just sore because you don't want to admit you're probably just part of the really detailed graphics for Sid Meier's Civilization 781: Dawn of the Space Age. If the pimply faced teenager in his mother's basement were to zoom in on you right at this instant, he'd see a thought bubble over your head saying, "haha, this guy is crazy".

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[Maritz]

The holographic principle isn't about whether or not we are in a simulation.

Re:Like testing for 'god'

[KGIII]

I've heard good things about putting people in a house with no doors and pushing a candle up against the curtains but, alas, I am not a gamer really. I did enjoy some sim games a while back. I liked Sim Ant, Sim City, and A-Train.

Of course its not a hologram

[DrXym]

It's a time cube. Everyone knows that.

Re:Of course its not a hologram

[Pseudonymous Powers]

It's a time cube. Everyone knows that.

No, everyone would know that, but they're educated stupid. To quote from the current edition of timecube.com: "This a major lie has so much evil feed from it's wrong."

Re:Of course its not a hologram

[Pfhorrest]

Time is not a cube. It's more like a... sort of a ball.... of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.

Re:Of course its not a hologram

[KGIII]

Since the early days of the hyperlink, I've clicked them all - for the most part. Well, not all, but a whole ton of 'em. I've clicked on links to goatse, Rick Astley, and XKCD comics that I'd seen dozens of times already. Yet, I saw a description for this timecube site in a web forum some years ago. It was then that I opted to not click on it - a *very* rare thing for me. Yet, I've still never seen that site.

It's kind of like how I now know who the Kardashians (spelling) are but I don't know if I've ever actually seen one. If I have, I didn't notice. I've had helpful people link me but I declined to learn more about them. It'd be like skipping a really bad book to get to the end chapter, or something like that. No, I'll live vicariously through the people who post about it. Sometimes, I imagine they're the damnedest of things.

Phew! We all dodged a bullet!

[pr0t0]

Working in a disused tunnel with a couple of lasers and a few mirrors, a plucky band of physicists dreamed up a way to...

Do I have to recount all the sci-fi horror movies that started off exactly like this? We're lucky they didn't open a door to another dimension and allow an ancient demigod to come through to devour our world. If Ian Ziering or Dean Cain had been anywhere near that tunnel at the time, we'd all be in deep kimchi right now.

Maybe we are in a VM...

[ShawnX]

Except we don't know the "command" yet to discover the hypervisor running the show. Each VM, one universe. :)

Re:Maybe we are in a VM...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the crazy thing is, I found this old server sitting on the shelf of my great great great great grandfathers starship. It's been turned off for millions of years. I just now turned it on and started poking around moments laters to find you posting this. You have no idea of how much time elapsed do you??! Of course not, you could never have known. Fascinating! I wonder what it's like to be in your VM. Or maybe I'm in a VM too, all VM-ing all the way down!!

This Elipislian Vogon fungus weed is very potent stuff. I'm going to avoid that planet from now on. Sorry.

P.S. I just fucked up the prime directive by talking with you. Sorry again.

Re:Maybe we are in a VM...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the great great great great great grandson of whom turned it off per your request. I just turned it back on to see if this old dusty thing still works. Yup, the quantum reactors still have power. Nice. Ok, I'm turning it back off again. Sorry to bother you all.

Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[squiggleslash]

About 75% of the non-troll comments I've seen here think that this is about the theory we're all in the Matrix, or some variant.

That's not what Holographic Theory is about. Now, I'm not a physicist and I suck at explaining things anyway, so I don't want to get too far into it, but essentially the holographic theory is that there are fewer "real" dimensions than is apparent (like a hologram is a flat sheet of paper that appears to be 3D.)

The name is based upon the behavior of paper holograms - like the one on your credit card. Holograms themselves are able to appear 3D by using natural interference patterns and resonance to ensure that, looked at from different angles, they transmit different images. Well, that's kinda the direction you need to go in to understand the Holographic Universe theory, rather than attempts to build 3D images in space to make a virtual universe look real (as in "Holodeck")

The point is that the universe is (d)D, but looks (d)D because of the way information is encoded. Or something. A genuine physicist can probably explain it more accurately (I'm 100% sure I've made at least one error above) and clearly than I can though. So... uh, does Phil Plait or Neil Degrasse Tyson read Slashdot?

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[squiggleslash]

The point is that the universe is (d)D, but looks (d)D because of the way information is encoded. Or something. A genuine physicist can probably explain it more accurately (I'm 100% sure I've made at least one error above) and clearly than I can though

Uh, correction...

The point is that the universe is (d-1)D, but looks (d)D because of the way information is encoded. Or something. A genuine physicist can probably explain it more accurately (I'm 100% sure I've made at least two errors above) and clearly than I can though

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Holographic theory in a nutshell: The amount of information contained in a black hole increases with the surface area of the event horizon, rather than with the volume as you might naively expect in a 3d universe.

Not a physicist but have stayed at a holiday inn express in the past. (in my frame of ref)

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[Pseudonymous Powers]

...essentially the holographic theory is that there are fewer "real" dimensions than is apparent (like a hologram is a flat sheet of paper that appears to be 3D. The point is that the universe is (d-1)D, but looks (d)D because of the way information is encoded.

Right, because string theory, completely untestable as it seems to be, is basically a make-work program for theoretical physicists. By the time Dr. 't Hooft rolled around, all the other string theorists had already staked out the claims that the universe has some number of dimensions greater than three. So he went the other way with it.

There's nothing a string theorist hates more than a falsifiable assertion, so if it turns out 't Hooft mucked up and accidentally formulated one, he's likely to be completely ostracized, the poor guy.

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[PopeRatzo]

About 75% of the non-troll comments I've seen here think that this is about the theory we're all in the Matrix, or some variant.

That's not what Holographic Theory is about. Now, I'm not a physicist and I suck at explaining things anyway, so I don't want to get too far into it, but essentially the holographic theory is that there are fewer "real" dimensions than is apparent (like a hologram is a flat sheet of paper that appears to be 3D.)

The name is based upon the behavior of paper holograms - like the one on your credit card. Holograms themselves are able to appear 3D by using natural interference patterns and resonance to ensure that, looked at from different angles, they transmit different images. Well, that's kinda the direction you need to go in to understand the Holographic Universe theory, rather than attempts to build 3D images in space to make a virtual universe look real (as in "Holodeck")

You're really trying to spoil everyone's fun, aren't you? Anyway, it's Friday and everyone's just waiting for a story about a woman who got a job in tech so we can all be outraged at SJWs and PC culture. Get with the program, you.

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[delt0r]

This is correct. A nd universe is encoded, or can be "encoded" ie all information on a (n-1)d surface. So all the information that can be contained in a volume is proportional to the surface containing that volume.

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[doug141]

So... uh, does Phil Plait or Neil Degrasse Tyson read Slashdot?

Try the book "Spooky Action at a Distance." It challenges the idea that 4D spacetime is fundamental, because of observations of entanglement. It discusses both the holographic universe theory, and also geometrogenesis under quantum graphity. http://guidetoreality.blogspot...

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[GuB-42]

From my understanding, a hologram is like a 2D array in a programming language.
array2D[x,y] is typically translated into something like array1D[x + ROW_SIZE * y], which work the same as long as x never exceed ROW_SIZE. To test if the universe works the same way is just a matter of knowing if there is a finite ROW_SIZE constant, which translates into fuzziness in the physical world.
Using a computer analogy doesn't mean we live in a computer simulation, it is just a way to appeal to the minds of programmers. A computer-simulated universe is a much stronger hypotheses than a holographic universe. A simulated universe running on a finite computer would make it zero-dimentional, or 1D if you include time.

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[wwalker]

Uh, correction...

The point is that the universe is (d-1)D, but looks (d)D because of the way information is encoded. Or something. A genuine physicist can probably explain it more accurately (I'm 100% sure I've made at least two errors above) and clearly than I can though

Source code must be a hologram too: since every bug you find is second-to-last.

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[Pseudonymous Powers]

...armchair pundits whining about untestability are just whiners looking for attention. Remember the Higgs was untestable back in the 1960s when it was first theorized and not tested for almost 50 years.

Yeah, you're right. There's a slight possibility that I'll owe exactly one of those guys a big mea culpa in a half-century or so. Just in case, I guess I should probably set up a charitable trust so that my descendants can apologize to theirs. I've already composed the letter:

Congratulations, from our grampa to your great-grampa, on guessing the right number of dimensions. Enclosed is a small cash bonus as a token of apology. Tell his decayed, mostly skeletal corpse to keep up the good work!

NOTE: An additional bonus will be awarded if the number of dimensions turned out to be 69.

Re:Reminder: Holographic theory != Simulation

[purplie]

Some words, like "inflammable" and "hologram", are irreversibly broken; don't use them. (Unless communication is less important than the smug sense of superiority you get from thinking you're smarter than everyone else).

Physicists, can you come up with another name for this? I know, your definition got there first, and it's a shame, but it's time to give up and move on.

Empirical Adequacy vs. "Absence of Evidence"

[rocket rancher]

Remember the Michelson-Morley experiments? From the pov of empirical adequacy, those negative results actually were confirmations of a more correct theory that was still eighteen years away. The classical, Newtonian paradigm, useful though it was (and still is, at non-relativistic velocities) needed to be tweaked to accommodate new evidence -- in the MM case, the lack of confirmatory results. When you use a model to ask a question about the universe, you have to be willing to change your model when the answer you get doesn't fit anywhere in your model. That is science. Anything else is religion, i.e., you ignore the answer or discredit the question, which is what the scientistific priesthood did to MM after they failed to find evidence of the "luminiferous aether." which was the dominant relig^H^H^H^H^H paradigm of the day.

So put the pitchforks and torches away, at least until science can come up with an altered holographic model to explain these results.

Re:Empirical Adequacy vs. "Absence of Evidence"

[tarpitcod]

Right. Aether theory was falsifiable. Big difference. These physicists are at least trying to do a test while some of the String theorists even bitch about it. The String theorists have had decades to come up with a decent test and failed. String theory is indistinguishable from 'turtles all the way down' at this point. Oh, except it's not. Turtles all the way down is at least falsifiable.

Well duh!

[Ol Olsoc]

The universe is not a hologram.

It's an ostomy bag

Re:Well duh!

[PopeRatzo]

And it's full, so if you don't mind, a little help here?

Interesting conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

If so, then it should be impossible to precisely define a 3D position, at least on very small scales of 10-35 meters.

Hogan figured he could spot the effect using L-shaped optical devices known as interferometers, in which laser light is used to measure the relative length of a device's two arms to within a fraction of an atom's width. If it were impossible to exactly define position, then "holographic noise" should cause the output of an interferometer to jiggle at a frequency of millions of cycles per second, he argued.

What if the position we observe IS exact but there is a corresponding parallel universe (in a multiverse) for each phase of the hypothesized oscillation (well, there would be an infinite spectrum of these, corresponding to divisions of a circle). This would interestingly imply a polar opposite universe from this one, and relationships between each based on their phase difference might be observed.

Disclaimer, I'm no more of an actual physicist than Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Re:Interesting conclusions

[KGIII]

I don't think everything has an opposite. What's the opposite of orange - the color and the fruit? What's the opposite of humans?

Astrology is better science than String theory

[tarpitcod]

String theory is no different from Astrology at this point, except Astrology is falsifiable because I can go and ask a bunch of Astrologers for a horoscope and actually compare them and say "Hey they all predict different things, this theory sucks!", or "WOW they all predicted the same thing and it happened!"

The excuse that "It's complicated and weird" is ok for a few minutes, but not a good excuse and an utter failure when decades have passed. Relativity had plenty of weird predictions, but we could (and did) test them. Quantum mechanics has piles of very weird predictions which we not only tested, we actually use them daily in all kinds of devices all around us.

So MASSIVE KUDO's to these physicists for having the temerity to try and test the damn thing. Even if their experiment produced a null result, it may well lead them to an experiment that wont.

Science is falsifiable. Anyone who sells you a theory, no matter how beautiful, that is un-falsifiable (by design), and can't produce any way to prove or disprove their theory is at best the equivalent of a well meaning Astrologist.

Re:Astrology is better science than String theory

[gweihir]

Most people are stupid and do not recognize the importance and validity of negative results. Unfortunately, scientific publishing has adopted that unscientific attitude and today things get tried over and over again because nobody managed to publish that they do not work.

Re:Astrology is better science than String theory

[ceoyoyo]

It's not true. There are lots of published negative results. They're even fairly easy to publish, because they're so novel. What doesn't get published, I think correctly, are inconclusive results.

A negative result is "such and such hypothesis/theory/previous result predicts that we should see a signal of this magnitude. Our experiment measures the signal to be X within a margin of error Y. This result is has a very low probability P if such and such hypothesis is true."

An inconclusive result is "my p-value isn't less than 0.05."

Turning an inconclusive result into a negative result requires additional statistical skills and usually redoing the experiment because in many fields experiments are not powered for producing negative results with any kind of reasonable confidence.

See the difference?

Re:Astrology is better science than String theory

[tarpitcod]

Oh come on. Astrology is way more testable than String theory.

Just admit it. You are already an AC. It's OK I won't tell on you.

Re:Astrology is better science than String theory

[Will.Woodhull]

I don't know enough about string theory, or for that matter cosmology in general, to comment about that part of parent post.

I do know enough about astrology to know that the scientific method could now be applied to its core concepts. It just won't be, because it is not real easy to do, and because the prejudice against astrology in the scientific community is very strong.

One approach that could be done now that was not possible until the last few decades would be to find some birth center that recorded times of birth in a consistent manner for several decades, take all the birth records for a few decades and reduce them to only date and time (thoroughly anonymous). Then compose a set of random dates and times of similar size with the same start and end points. Use software like Astrolog (that can be automated to work on large data sets) to generate horoscopes for each date/time in both data sets (using the birth center location for longitude and latitude). The random set is now representative of all possible births at the birth center, while the other is the subset of births that actually occurred. As anyone involved in obstetrics will tell you, births are not uniformly distributed over time: there will be periods of many births in a day or a week and times of many days with few if any births.

If there is anything to astrology, there will be significant statistical differences between the two sets of horoscopes. However these probably will not be blatantly obvious or they would have been noticed before now. There might, for instance, be more of a particular type of relationship between Sun, Moon, and Ascendant in the subset of birth charts than in the random charts. We don't care what the astrological significance of any findings are-- that might be the subject of further research. We are only interested in whether we find a significant difference between the moments when a real birth occurred and what the random sample of potential births shows.

Plucky Underdogs?

[Thunderf00t]

Since when has Fermilab fallen into disuse? It doesn't have an accelerator as powerful as the LHC at CERN, but it's still very active in experimentation, and still draws from expert talent to design and conduct those experiments. It's not like any recent physics grad can just walk up to Fermilab and get a job, and I guarantee that the experimentalists noted in the summary were already well-established in their field.

Re:Plucky Underdogs?

[EvilSS]

Since when has Fermilab fallen into disuse? It doesn't have an accelerator as powerful as the LHC at CERN, but it's still very active in experimentation, and still draws from expert talent to design and conduct those experiments. It's not like any recent physics grad can just walk up to Fermilab and get a job, and I guarantee that the experimentalists noted in the summary were already well-established in their field.

Wasn't their accelerator shut down in 2011?

Re:Plucky Underdogs?

[ITRambo]

Yeah. It's not a science ghetto just yet. Still a cool place to visit too. http://www.fnal.gov/

Re:Plucky Underdogs?

[tarpitcod]

They should put up a big sign outdoors that says "The particle accelerator that DIDN'T destroy the world!", and sell T-Shirts too.

That's just what a hologram would say!

[RumGunner]

This is not the evidence you're looking for! You can go about your business! Move along!

Well there ya go

[kelemvor4]

This explains why the boys at Fermilab lost funding for their toys a few years ago...

To me it's purely logical

[Art3x]

To me, the Holographic Principle is just another way to understand dimensions.

As I understand it, it says that you could encode everything in a room on its walls, ceiling, and floor. The position of every particle could be etched by a pair of points --- say, one on the ceiling and one on a wall. Is there anything in a room that could not be fully covered on its walls?

From there you imagine unfolding the room into a sheet. Now the room is two dimensions, but as long as you keep track of the folds, you can reconstruct the three-dimensional space. And you imagine some point that was moving in the room is now a pair of points, some distance apart, on this 2-D sheet. The three-dimensionality arises from these two points somehow being synchronized, entangled.

Actually from there you can go to one dimension, as any good programmer should know. For if you have a screen, it can be unfolded again. A screen is just a stream of data, with line breaks.

Re:To me it's purely logical

[oh_my_080980980]

Logical like tying one's self into a pretzel. RIP string theory. Congratulations on a job, done.

Misplaced judgements about Science

[tinkerton]

However, science doesn't indulge sentimental favorites.

Oh really. These people had an unlikely hypothesis and a low cost way to test it. That sounds perfectly alright to me. Or is science supposed to only test low risk hypothesis that are bound to be confirmed? If you look at science as an investment game you sure can have good investors and bad investors, but you can have people sensibly investing in high chance/low gain tests as well as in low chance/high gain tests.

Of course most people think science should be an old style banking scheme that is highly risk averse and only willing to invest in things that are sure wins. I disagree.

Re:Misplaced judgements about Science

[tarpitcod]

Actually physics now seems more like current banking schemes where we have a depression but nobody wants to call it that. So they call it the "Great Recession", fiddle the statistics, don't count all the people under-employed and just kind of say 'Things are great!'.

We prop up the physics community with stuff like CERN and ITER - mega projects too big to fail. Sort of like the big banks and GM and other stuff.

Early 20th century physics was way more like the old economy with boom and bust cycles.

Re:Misplaced judgements about Science

[tinkerton]

Well, I'm not confident enough to state it that way but your metaphor gets a valid point across. I recall Freeman Dyson , who's always been wary of mega projects, pointing out that if you look at nobel prizes in physics, then one third went to the high energy things, another third to more precise measurement and another third to I forgot what. So he suggested we don't put all our money in the high energy tools but spread it around more. He wasn't saying the high energy experiments were too big too fail I think - though he has refered to it that as a common attribute of mega-projects.

Re:Misplaced judgements about Science

[tarpitcod]

Dyson has said lots of interesting things and it's worth listening to him IMHO. I'm in the camp that believes the more strongly you believe something in science, the closer it is to dogma, the more you should be willing to throw a little money to the heretics who say you are all completely wrong. Assuming they have a testable theory.

It's a small investment for a possibly huge pay-off. For example - if someone said - "I've found a fairly cheap test based on some of stuff like what Petr Beckmann said that would diverge from Einstein's predictions" -- well why not give it a try?

Re:Misplaced judgements about Science

[tinkerton]

Well, I'd prefer the argument to be about what is legitimate science and general budgetting than about specifics. Beckmann, really? Ok then, it does drive the point home. But I would not go as far as saying science should have to invest in what they consider stupid choices. More that those who want to invest in what others consider stupid choices are not doing bad science. And the other thing is spreading the effort amongst choices that are not considered stupid/

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?

[fredrated]

I never understood this phrase. If there is absence of evidence then you don't need evidence of absence. After all, if you have no evidence, then you have nothing and why should I even need to produce evidence of absence?

Re:Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?

[ledow]

We have no evidence at all that cows suffer damage by passive smoking. Nobody's ever done that experiment.

We can infer. We can guess. But we have no evidence at all.

So is "absence of that evidence" in itself evidence that cows actually don't suffer damage from passive smoking?

There's no evidence. So we have nothing, right?

Of course, it's easy to go and obtain evidence.
But in the same way that you can't make an absolute positive from no evidence, you can't make an absolute negative either. The answer is literally indeterminate and unknown.

Now, for cows, that's not a big problem. But some things we can't collect evidence either way. At least not directly. But NOT being able to find the evidence we need, when we're not really looking, is not evidence that we're wrong.

You have to look to be wrong. No actual evidence means you haven't looked deeply enough to come to any conclusion. If you had looked deeply enough, it would be evidence - one way or another.

Basically it means "Don't jump to conclusions". Nobody has looked deep enough to find anything. And nobody has evidence enough that THE OPPOSITE is true either. Like in this case. Someone says they looked, but they can't have looked very deeply or correctly, and may not even be in looking in the right place at all. Thus we can't eliminate the theory either way, and so we have to keep both options open in the tree of possibilities that stem from that.

Re:Entropy increases with area not volume

[shoor]

I'm not a physicist either. I first remember reading about this in a Scientific Amercian Article years and years ago.

I think the notion came from studying black holes and the entropy associated with them. (See the wikipedia article on black holes under the section on 'entropy and black holes'.) Entropy is related to information, and the amount of information that can be contained in a volume of space increases as the surface area increases rather than as the volume increases. If you double the diameter of a sphere, the volume increases by 2 cubed, while the surface increases by 2 squared. So, you think of being able to put 8 times as many gumdrops in a bowl with twice the diameter, but you apparently cannot stuff 8 times as much information, only 4 times as much, so it's as though all the info contained could be represented on its surface, like a hologram.

Re:Antelopes are better spellers than tarpitcod

[Hognoxious]

You left out the thing that belongs to a kudo, whatever the heck that is.

#1 hologram

[queequeg1]

So I guess Tupac retains the claim to #1 hologram now that the Universe has been debunked.

Re:Antelopes are better spellers than tarpitcod

[tarpitcod]

You are parsing my spelling from the wrong multiverse.

Anyone else

[Hognoxious]

Anyone else read that as "not a hooligan"?

Re:Feynman on cyclotrons

[shoor]

In Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman Richard Feynman talks about seeing the cyclotron at Princeton after having been at MIT, and the one at Cornell later. MIT had a big cyclotron and he expected Princeton's to be even bigger. He was surprised to find out it was in the basement of an old building, but when he saw it, he understood.

It was wonderful! Because they worked with it! They didn't have to sit in another room and push buttons! ...
(When I got to Cornell ...It was the word's smallest cyclotron but they got fantastic results. They had all kinds of special techniques and tricks.

Never understood this.

[jdharm]

How is it possible, even in vaguest theory, for an experiment inside this universe to test the holographic universe theory? Even if this experiment had found the hypothesized effect they would have been no closer to verifying the holographic theory because there could be any arbitrary number of other hypothetical explanations for the effect that had nothing to do with the holographic theory, no? Never mind the particulars of the experiment, how was it even possible in theory that this experiment would offer any insight at all as to the veracity of the holographic universe theory? To test the holographic universe theory would require not being confined to this universe, to be able to interact with or detect existence outside of the universe being tested, no?

A learned hamster scientist looking for tenure wants to test the ball universe theory. He shoots a laser at a right angle to the bottom of his universe and again at a 45 degree angle to the bottom of his universe. He repeats the 45 degree experiment 360 times, increment the bearing each time. The light comes right back to his laser in the right angle experiment. In the 45 degree experiment it comes back to him from 45 degrees elevation and 180 degrees opposite bearing with 3 times the energy loss as seen in the right angle experiment. All the 45 degree experiments get the same result. He has just proven the ball universe theory, right? NO. He's just proven the inside of his universe is a ball. He still knows nothing about the outside of his universe or the nature any part of his universe beyond its inner boundary.

How is the experiment in the article any different from the hamster scientist's experiment? The only thing they can possibly test is the nature of existence inside the universe and not the nature of the universe itself.

Great news for 3D printing!

[dsmatthews9379]

Now we can be sure that our printers could be accurate to 10^-35 meters.

Logical positivism says argument is wordplay

[peter303]

More a limitation of slightly contradictory English words and logic, than an air tight argument. In the mid 20th century there was a movement to claim much of philosophy and thology was wordplay. ButLogical positism is more just a tool in the toolkit now.

holograph is conservation of information in black

[peter303]

Hawking and his competitors argue whether information is lost when matter-energy falls into a black hole. Is information converstion a universal law? A proposed solution is that a copy of anything crossing the event horizon is perserved when something crosses it. The surface area of an event horizon is exactly large enough in Planck units to preserve all the information inside a black hole. Then you can propse some semi-mystical mumbo-jumbo that beacause two regions ofbinformation are idetical, they in fact are identical objects. Now you can take this one step further that this does not only apply to black hole singularities, but white hole singularities such as our own universe. So there is a copy of everything inside universe on the event horizon 13.8 billion light years out, i.e our hologram. And there is no real distinction between the hologram and our universe. This is presented in Susskind's book The Black Hole Wars.