Searching for the holographic universe

[n2doc]

by Leah Hesla

The beauty of the small operation—the mom-and-pop restaurant or the do-it-yourself home repair—is that pragmatism begets creativity. The industrious individual who makes do with limited resources is compelled onto paths of ingenuity, inventing rather than following rules to address the project’s peculiarities.

As project manager for the Holometer experiment at Fermilab, physicist Aaron Chou runs a show that, though grandiose in goal, is remarkably humble in setup. Operated out of a trailer by a small team with a small budget, it has the feel more of a scrappy startup than of an undertaking that could make humanity completely rethink our universe.

The experiment is based on the proposition that our familiar, three-dimensional universe is a manifestation of a two-dimensional, digitized space-time. In other words, all that we see around us is no more than a hologram of a more fundamental, lower-dimensional reality.

If this were the case, then space-time would not be smooth; instead, if you zoomed in on it far enough, you would begin to see the smallest quantum bits—much as a digital photo eventually reveals its fundamental pixels.

more

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/april-2014/searching-for-the-holographic-universe

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Every time I see this brought up, it reminds me of

the 'Amber' novels of Roger Zelazney, in which primal 'pattern' realities underlay an infinite number of realities, each subtly different from the last.

[BillZBubb]

2. It doesn't seem like a likely possibility.

If the universe were static, then a holographic interpretation might be plausible. But the universe is in constant motion. That would require the changes needed in the two dimensional space-time to represent 3 dimensional motion to have some dramatic instantaneous changes to allow for object to appear to pass each other, near each other, etc. Squeezing three dimensional space time into a two dimensional framework asks a lot of the two dimensional space time.

[bananas]

3. "Operated out of a trailer by a small team with a small budget, it has the feel..."

'nuf said!
I'm there dude!

[bananas]

4. "That's why I wear such shabby clothes...It's really crawling-around-on-the-floor kind of work..."

“That’s why I wear such shabby clothes,” he says. “This is not the type of experiment where you sit behind the computer and analyze data or control things remotely all day long. It’s really crawling-around-on-the-floor kind of work, which I actually find to be kind of a relief, because I spent more than a decade sitting in front of a computer for more well-established experiments where the installation took 10 years and most of the resulting experiment is done from behind a keyboard.”