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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFermilab Experiment Finds No Evidence That We Live in a Hologram
http://gizmodo.com/fermilab-experiment-finds-no-evidence-that-we-live-in-a-1746130140A controversial experiment at Fermilab designed to hunt for signs that our universe may really be a hologram has failed to find the evidence it was seeking, the laboratory has announced.
Its called the Holometer (short for Holographic Interferometer), and its the brainchild of Fermilab physicist Craig Hogan. He dreamed up the idea in 2009 as a way to test the so-called holographic principle.
Back in the 1970s, a physicist named Jacob Bekenstein showed that the information about a black holes interior is encoded on its two-dimensional surface area (the boundary) rather than within its three-dimensional volume (the bulk). Twenty years later, Leonard Susskind and Gerard t Hooft extended this notion to the entire universe, likening it to a hologram: our three-dimensional universe in all its glory emerges from a two-dimensional source code. New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye has likened the holographic concept to a can of soup. All the stuff of the universe, including human beings, makes up the soup inside the can, but all the information describing that stuff is inscribed on the label on the outside boundary.
Susskind initially considered it to be a metaphor, but then crunched some more numbers and concluded that the notion made literal sense as well: the 3D universe really is a projection of 2D information at the boundary.
The holographic principle has since become one of the most influential ideas in theoretical physics, yet many believe it to be untestable, at least for now. (It would require probing black holes up-close, a daunting prospect even if we had the technology to do so.) Hogan decided to try anyway. The Holometer looks for a special kind of holographic noise a kind of quantum jitter in space-time using a fairly humble-looking set-up: an array of lasers and mirrors in a dank underground tunnel, with the control room housed in a trailer. Nobody ever said physics was glamorous.
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I'm still waiting for them to prove it's not turtles all the way down.
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Fermilab Experiment Finds No Evidence That We Live in a Hologram (Original Post)
FLPanhandle
Dec 2015
OP
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,734 posts)1. Well, that's a relief.
I can cross the possibility of being in a hologram off my ever-growing list of things to worry about.
FLPanhandle
(7,107 posts)6. I was hoping to reprogram the Holodeck
The existing program has a few flaws. Like where is my sailing yacht?
Live and Learn
(12,769 posts)2. Good gawd, you mean this is for real? Frightening. nt
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)3. I follow theoretical physics with passionate intensity
despite being hopelessly mathlexic.
This was perhaps the nuttiest theory I have heard from actual scientists.
I'm still waiting for the string theorists to come up with even one little old testable prediction.
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,734 posts)4. What if they actually do prove it's turtles all the way down?
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)5. Terry Pratchett will be proven to have been a genuine prophet.
ETA