You and I May Be Living in a Giant Hologram

For the past seven years, the GEO600 experiment has been looking for gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true

:eek:

 

So what was it. I'm now virus shy and don't click anymore.

 

stay under your bed

 

Do we need to get Theseus involved here?

 

Best idea you've had so far.

 

Thanks for the link. That is very interesting. I have known of this as a possibility from Maldacena's theorem. That there could be experimental results confirming this is out of this world amazing.

I don't understand how they can distinguish true random noise from a signal from something so fundamentally minute. I don't quite follow how the projection of what happens at the edge of the universe onto it's interior, how they are able to defuzzify the presence of a signal from noise.

 

Can anyone do me a favor and put this in layman terms? Well... how about idiot terms is better for me. Even if it's not quite an exact analogy, it would be helpful heh.

 

That article already puts it in layman's terms. But I will try.

Basically there is a theorem from Maldecena that shows that you can not distinguish the physics of living in a five dimensional universe from a four dimensional one where the physics of the 4-D universe take place on the four dimensional boundary. This is a bit abstract if you are not used to it. There is a strong tie with it and Hawkins discovery on information loss in black holes:

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

But this is an aside albeit important one in following the idea on a deeper level.

The idea is that a boundary of a lower dimensional manifold can encode all the information of a higher dimension manifold:

http://hologramreality.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-our-universe-gigantic-hologram.html

So what we think is a four dimensional universe may be an illusion of a projection of some three dimensional boundary somewhere. It is as if we (our reality) are are being played on a movie screen.

I am not sure this helps...I probably said the same thing using different words.

 

Christ there's a lot of information out there.

Over the weekend, I went down the rabbit hole of mind emulation only to end up at some transhumanist seance (Guess who the key note speaker was?). Now, you start bringing up space/time continuums with entropy and thermal dynamics for flavor. Are we gonna dice up time linearly or continue to exist throughout the spectrum at the same time... or both?

I read the article twice and it makes me dizzy.