Is the Universe a

for instance this looks interesting.
and to me I am not so sure all these guys are claiming the holographic idea is just a metaphor.

It seems at least some scientists are saying the universe is a projection of something else... something else which may be information locked in to 2 dimensions... or something else.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/11/universe-hologram-physicists_n_4428359.html

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.

In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true.

In one paper, Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence. In the other, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.

“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and who did not contribute to the team's work.

Regime change
The findings “are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory”, Maldacena adds. The two papers, he notes, are the culmination of a series of articles contributed by the Japanese team over the past few years. “The whole sequence of papers is very nice because it tests the dual [nature of the universes] in regimes where there are no analytic tests.”

“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.

Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.

Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory.

 

http://www.universetoday.com/107172/why-our-universe-is-not-a-hologram/


but then there is this...

In 1993, Gerard t’Hooft proposed what is now known as the holographic principle, which argued that the information contained within a region of space can be determined by the information at the surface that contains it. Mathematically, the space can be represented as a hologram of the surface that contains it.
That idea is not as wild as it sounds. For example, suppose there is a road 10 miles long, and its is “contained” by a start line and a finish line. Suppose the speed limit on this road is 60 mph, and I want to determine if a car has been speeding. One way I could do this is to watch a car the whole length of the road, measuring its speed the whole time. But another way is to simply measure when a car crosses the start line and finish line. At a speed of 60 mph, a car travels a mile a minute, so if the time between start and finish is less than 10 minutes, I know the car was speeding.
A visualization of strings. Image credit: R. Dijkgraaf.
A visualization of strings. Image credit: R. Dijkgraaf.
The holographic principle applies that idea to string theory. Just as its much easier to measure the start and finish times than constantly measure the speed of the car, it is much easier to do physics on the surface hologram than it is to do physics in the whole volume. The idea really took off when Juan Martín Maldacena derived what is known as the AdS/CFT correspondence (an arxiv version of his paper is here ), which uses the holographic principle to connect the strings of particle physics string theory with the geometry of general relativity.

While Maldacena made a compelling argument, it was a conjecture, not a formal proof. So there has been a lot of theoretical work trying to find such a proof. Now, two papers have come out (here and here) demonstrating that the conjecture works for a particular theoretical case. Of course the situation they examined was for a hypothetical universe, not a universe like ours. So this new work is really a mathematical test that proves the AdS/CFT correspondence for a particular situation.
From this you get a headline implying that we live in a hologram. On twitter, Ethan Siegel proposed a more sensible headline: “Important idea of string theory shown not to be mathematically inconsistent in one particular way”.
Of course that would probably get less attention.


Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/107172/why-our-universe-is-not-a-hologram/#ixzz2nUl2phfE

 

I will say as I read more into this... it does look as one author said it does look a bit like string theorists trying to keep string theory relevant.

 

Beautiful analogy, though I don't know if it's a good one. Is it yours?

 

With the idea that the Universe is continuously expanding, faster it seems the farther we look, it'd be interesting to consider another idea (not mine - I came across it somewhere)...

The Universe is a sphere, and the new galaxies and other objects we *discover* are actually versions of known nearby objects as seen X thousands/millions of light-years in the past....

Probably depends on space time bending light and other deep physics I'm not familiar with, but I like the idea.

 

really you think stu understands quantum physics well; after all the lies he made up on threads about fine tuning? I guarantee that although he acted like it was his concept, he stole it.

 

update... he stole it.
i saw the exact analogy in a book on google books. stu's took it almost verbatim.

 

I tend to lean towards Mr. Sagans view of things. Those who speak with absolute certainty on the subject of creation, PHD or not, ordained minister/priest/whatever crown they may wear or not, aren't really interested in the pursuit of truth.

“An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.”

 

Thanks Ricter.
I know of the analogy and I conveyed it as I remember it. Unlike the obviously angry and embittered Jem, who's never been able to think for himself and therfore finds he must copy absolutely everything so his ego can inevitably direct him to yet another hopelessly wrong conclusion by it.

I've heard a number of different analogies used to explain the fascinating science behind this particular facet of quantum mechanics, proving how subatomic particles instantaneously interact with each other no matter what distance they are apart.

I like that one as it tends to explain the position as it has been proven. Essentially to do with the paradox of not being possible to both measure and observe quantum systems without altering their fundamental state.

Einstein (with others) described the situation with a different analogy before knowing the reality which further science developed. That was on the lines of closed boxes placed at opposite ends of the universe which both held correlated quantum states (simplistically say - same source photons), so that when the boxes were opened precisely at the exact same moment , they would instantaneously transfer information to each other to decide their state - whether they would be a particle or a wave.

Einstein thought that to be impossible as it would violate the basic law of physics. The information being instantaneously exchanged would have to travel faster than light itself.
Later of course this came to be shown incorrect, as the science behind entanglement became confirmed .

Holographic universe in scientific terms is not a description to say the universe is an actual hologram. The fundamental principles and characteristics of an interconnected wholeness at its fundamental level are the feature of holograms and was the inspiration in developing proposals for understanding the most primary and basic state of the universe.

The principal is that the universe, now in a dispersed state, is still directly connected to its fundamental primary level , as is the case with holographs where orders of reality are hidden from each other but are directly interconnected and interact. So as with the duality of light, it being either a wave or particle is hidden as a quantum system, and the way it is observed determines how the system will unfold.

Another analogy I like is an ink drop's primary state unfolding into a totally different state when it is dispersed in water. However, if it can be shown it is fundamentally connected to its original state as a drop, then none of its information will be lost as it disperses and both the disperssed state and the drop state interact, depending on how it is being observed. As is the case in a quantum mechanical aspect , just like a photon both as a wave and a particle, depending on how it is observed.

The dude who invented the holographic metaphor, theoretical physicist David Bohm, is said to have been inspired from the ink drop analogy.

I found this which you might find interesting. It's the type of experiment Bohm once saw that set him on a course that lead him to legitimately bring into question understandings that even shake known classical science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3YZ5veN_Bg

 

He may not understand it well, who does?, but at least he doesn't perversely twist the science to support a preordained ideology like you do.