World’s Most Precise Clocks Could Reveal Universe Is a Hologram

[n2doc]

By Dave Mosher October 28, 2010 | 7:11 pm | Categories: Physics


Our existence could be coded in a finite bandwidth, like a live ultra-high-definition 3-D video. And the third dimension we know and love could be no more than a holographic projection of a 2-D surface.

A scientist’s $1 million experiment, now under construction in Illinois, will attempt to test these ideas by the end of next year using what will be two of the world’s most precise clocks.

Skeptics of a positive result abound, but their caution comes with good reason: The smallest pieces of space, time, mass and other properties of the universe, called Planck units, are so tiny that verifying them by experiment may be impossible. The Planck unit of length, for example, is 10 trillion trillion times smaller than the width of a proton.

Craig Hogan, a particle astrophysicist at Fermilab in Illinois, isn’t letting this seemingly insurmountable barrier stop him from trying.



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/holometer-universe-resolution/

[DCKit]

1. And when we know for sure, it's all over. Reality, as we know it, will end.

Happy Halloween!

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. The nine billion names of God.

"overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

[xchrom]

2. wow. nt

[Jackpine Radical]

3. Wow, indeed.

Many have speculated along those lines. Are you familiar with Amit Goswami? He's a western-trained Indian physicist who has built a model of reality that assigns primacy to mind. It clears up a few of the old paradoxes, and might work quite well as a framework if this guy gets unconventional results.

[xchrom]

8. i have heard of him and read a little -- i have to tell you

i don't really understand it all -- but i'm very interested.

[Joe Chi Minh]

22. I wonder what you mean by "clears up a few of the old paradoxes"?

The only way in which a paradox can be "cleared up" is by proving that it was never a paradox in the first place.

Paradoxes are the bane of putative "rationalists", who cannot come to terms with their role in theoretical physics, since they are mysteries as intractable to human reason as any of the divine mysteries of Christianity.

However, in order to succeed in their research, what physicists at the cutting-edge are obliged to do, is to accept the mysteries, "hook, line and sinker", integrating them into their research findings, and using them as "spring-boards", in precisely the same way that Christians accept the mysteries of the faith, in order to develop their understanding of the more abstruse questions concerning the human condition. Although not by way of subjectively and gratuitously postulating further paradoxes, as theoretical physicists have evidently found themseleves resorting to, in their desperation at discovering that the scope of theoretical physics is becoming increasingly limited, hitting a growing wall of paradoxes. Yet, bizarrely, we currently have theoretical physicists conjecturing paradoxical scenarios, to explain intrinsically inexplicable physical paradoxes.

Well, perhaps, "oxymoronic", rather than "paradoxical" scenarios, until such time as they are able prove their existence. One example that springs to mind is that, apparently, it has been postulated that the Big Bang was created by a set of laws! Another is the fantastically facile way in which "evolution" and "natural selection" seem to viewed, not as physical processes, which they are -no more and no less - but as dynamic self-creating forces.

I mean as a parlour game, why not? But it has nothing to do with science or philosophy. Of course, not all mysteries are paradoxes and, thus, insoluble.

As I quoted in an earlier post, Neils Bohr put it this way:

"Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems;"

and,

"Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language."

[The_Casual_Observer]

4. They hit a brick wall with unified theory & gravity, so now this crap.

[tridim]

15. Research what a particle actually is and you'll probably change your mind.

As you zoom in, particles are blurry on their edges all the way to the edge of the universe, in all directions.

Einstein didn't know this.

[Confusious]

25. Crap? define crap

unified theory & gravity -> string theory. No wall there.

[NBachers]

5. Oh, man I love ultra egghead shit like this.

[MineralMan]

6. Yah, and there's some 4-dimensional kid holding up a little

thing and turning it back and forth to watch our quaint 3-D universe. His mom got it for him at Edmund Scientific. Just like we do with holograms in our 3-D world. Pretty cool idea.

Thing is, even if it turns out to be true, nothing changes in our little hologram. So, it's just interesting.

[blue sky at night]

9. wow, it is so refreshing to take a break and look at something good...

I am really getting down with all of the election gloom and doom. You can bet the knuckle-dragging crowd would denounce this experiment as a huge waste of time and money because they know the only research worth doing is how to kill Muslims and find Obama'a birth certificate. Thanks for the post!!!

[ProfessionalLeftist]

10. Oh boy. I bet the freepers will have a field day with this one

being posted on DU. Not saying you shouldn't - just well, you know...

[unblock]

11. there's no science so complex that it can't be reduced to a headline that's short, pithy, and wrong.

[hunter]

12. I figure it's time that's the projection.

And not "...the third dimension we know and love."

[tridim]

13. Susskind believes this, and the way he explains it make it seem correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

It works in smaller scale with black holes too, as well as my own "everything is a singularity and everything equals zero" theory.

[Joe Chi Minh]

23. That is fascinating about the black holes. Reading the Wiki article, entitled the

Holographic Principle, makes me envious of such scientists, who are able to build up an intelligible (to themselves), internally consistent picture, using their reason (including acceptance of the paradoxes found in physics at that kind of level).

Could there be any adventure to compare with the excitement of being involved in such theoretical research and discovery? I'd even prefer it to being a frontiersman/army scout in the Wild West - for which I would be at least as ill-equipped; particularly, not being too aware of my surroundings at the best of times.

[Joe Chi Minh]

24. My previous dream occupation was finally sealed when I saw The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,

and those army scouts with the long beards and long coats, riding into town at the head of a columnn of Union troops.

Tuco bawls out: "Hurrah for Dixie!"

General Sibley, with studied deliberation, and fixing him with a disdainful glare, slaps the dust from his uniform with the gauntlets he's holding in his hand. Priceless. Tuco does, what Tuco does best. Spreads mayhem, alarm and despondency.

But I digress. Where were we? Oh, yes. About that entropy business...

[jberryhill]

14. I thought I was feeling a little cramped

Dang, it would suck to find out I lost a whole dimension.


I blame Obama.

[jgraz]

16. They can't fool me.

It's turtles all the way down.

[unc70]

17. And all realities are virtual

I have been saying that since the early 70's.

[Jackpine Radical]

21. So now we know

the era in which you started drugs.

[GreenPartyVoter]

18. Are you telling me that all the screwy stuff in my life is just bad programming? Fix the code! Fix

the danged code!!! x(

[silverweb]

19. Awesome.

Mind-bending, mind-blowing, wonderfully, weirdly awesome!


"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed."
-Albert Einstein

[pokerfan]

20. The implication of all this is

that we're Sims!

[Odin2005]

26. I still have yet to get my head around the whole "Holographic Principle" thing.

It makes my head hurt, and for me that is saying a lot.