Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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.
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.