I hope you all had a good festive period, and managed to get a bit of time to relax and recharge. December turned out to be quite a lot busier than I was expecting, but it was fun too. The next few days are likely to be a little hectic, given that New Year’s Eve is my birthday, and I seem to have managed to line up a huge bundle of paperwork to get done before then too. Ghostwoods will be back to its daily update schedule by New Year, anyway.
My pick for the outright strangest find of 2009 has to go to Craig Hogan, the director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics. As reported by New Scientist magazine back in January, he has found evidence to suggest that the entire universe and everything in it might be nothing more than a holographic projection.
To quote from one the article’s less technical bits:
The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.
- New Scientist #2691
The idea is simply mind-boggling, and makes all of those late-night “What if we’re really just living in a computer simulation” conversations seem lazy and timid, frankly. What’s more disconcerting is that the world of physics appears to have greeted Hogan’s findings quite cheerfully. The implication, according to NS at least, is that this theory would in fact help a lot of other things make sense.
Hogan’s findings are related to an ongoing problem of unexpected static in a large German detector, the GEO600, designed to attempt to find evidence of gravity waves. The static appears to match the sort of distortion you would expect to find if you were looking really closely at the fundamental limit of space-time — the point where smooth reality breaks down into individual dots, in the same way a computer image breaks down into pixels if you use a big magnifying glass.
GEO600
We already know from work on black holes that a flat 2-D plane (the black hole’s event horizon) can hold all the information about a 3-D environment (the original star that became the black hole). The universe has a similar boundary, stemming from its time of creation. Similarly, we’ve also known for some time that the universe would break down into turbulence when we managed to look closely enough. This limit is the Planck Length, 10^-35 metres. The Planck Length is far, far tinier than anything we can hope to detect however, so it had been assumed that we would never detect that fundamental turbulence.
That is where Hogan came in. If the universe was holographic, with its ‘reality’ on the outside shell, the information inside would break down long before the Planck Length.
Think about a hollow egg. Now consider filling it with sand versus coating it with sand. It’s obvious that you can fit far more sand inside. The only way to get the same number of grains both covering the outside and filling the inside is to use much bigger grains on the inside. The same principle applies to the holographic principle. To quote Hogan himself, “A holographic universe is blurry … if you lived inside a hologram, you could tell by the blurring.”
Hogan calculated that if we lived in a holographic universe, we could expect to see reality starting to break down into static at 10^-16 metres. That’s within the detection range of several devices we already have, including the GEO600. He got in touch with the GEO600 team, and discovered that they were experiencing static that they couldn’t explain, that matched his calculations. “It looked exactly the same as my predictions,” he said.
It’s too early to claim anything definitive. Even Hogan himself cheerfully agrees that the static could come from some so-far unexplained source. Further experiments will need to be done, ones that look more specifically for holographic noise. But if it does turn out to be evidence of a holographic universe, “We would,” Hogan says, “have directly observed the quantum of time … Ultimately, we may have our first indication of how space-time emerges out of quantum theory.”
If you fancy some more enigmatic New Scientist mysteries, why not have a look at 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, 13 More Things That Don’t Make Sense, and 10 Things We Don’t Understand About Humans.
If space and time were integrated into computational quantum mechanics as well defined variables, the definition of cosmic topology should be available. Making them boundaries of atomic force radiation in a series differential expansion of { d(Psi)/dt } in a Schrodinger equation for a single atom may be used to build that sort of model. Recent advancements in quantum science have produced the picoyoctometric, 3D, interactive video atomic model imaging function, in terms of chronons and spacons for exact, quantized, relativistic animation. This format returns clear numerical data for a full spectrum of variables. The atom’s RQT (relative quantum topological) data point imaging function is built by combination of the relativistic Einstein-Lorenz transform functions for time, mass, and energy with the workon quantized electromagnetic wave equations for frequency and wavelength.
The atom labeled psi (Z) pulsates at the frequency {Nhu=e/h} by cycles of {e=m(c^2)} transformation of nuclear surface mass to forcons with joule values, followed by nuclear force absorption. This radiation process is limited only by spacetime boundaries of {Gravity-Time}, where gravity is the force binding space to psi, forming the GT integral atomic wavefunction. The expression is defined as the series expansion differential of nuclear output rates with quantum symmetry numbers assigned along the progression to give topology to the solutions.
Next, the correlation function for the manifold of internal heat capacity energy particle 3D functions is extracted by rearranging the total internal momentum function to the photon gain rule and integrating it for GT limits. This produces a series of 26 topological waveparticle functions of the five classes; {+Positron, Workon, Thermon, -Electromagneton, Magnemedon}, each the 3D data image of a type of energy intermedon of the 5/2 kT J internal energy cloud, accounting for all of them.
Those 26 energy data values intersect the sizes of the fundamental physical constants: h, h-bar, delta, nuclear magneton, beta magneton, k (series). They quantize atomic dynamics by acting as fulcrum particles. The result is the exact picoyoctometric, 3D, interactive video atomic model data point imaging function, responsive to keyboard input of virtual photon gain events by relativistic, quantized shifts of electron, force, and energy field states and positions.
Images of the h-bar magnetic energy waveparticle of ~175 picoyoctometers are available online at http://www.symmecon.com with the complete RQT atomic modeling manual titled The Crystalon Door, copyright TXu1-266-788. TCD conforms to the unopposed motion of disclosure in U.S. District (NM) Court of 04/02/2001 titled The Solution to the Equation of Schrodinger.
I’m wondering how the nature of Universe (and for purely artistic reasons I hope it turns out to be a Hobartian dreamscape) would tangibly affect our experience of Universe. How is human experience of the Holographic Universe different from human experience of the other alternatives?