“If you lived inside a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring”
I’ve read a few stories about the holographic principle, but none as mind bending as this one. The story’s got possible evidence and some good journalism going for it. If you aren’t familiar with it, the “The Matrix” has nothing on this idea from theoretical physics;
…Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.
The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard’t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
Even though this idea is gaining momentum due to “noise” that could turn out to have a mundane source, it’s exciting that results from the GEO600 could lead to further investigation into this, in the near future; “We are very eager to find out what we can learn about the possible holographic noise over the course of the coming year”, says Prof. Dr. Karsten Danzmann, director of the Hannover Albert-Einstein-Institute. “GEO600 is the only experiment in the world able to test this controversial theory at this time… You could say that this has placed us in the very centre of a tornado in fundamental research!” That was about a year ago, so I’m hoping there’ll be some update in the next few months.
Update:
In an email to another theoretical physicist, Hartmut Grote from GEO 600 said that;
“In GEO600 we recently found that there is no more unexplained noise in the region from 150 to 300 Hz, if we use a different readout method, which points to the fact that the unexplained noise in this region might be associated with the former readout method, and not be of any fundamental type (i.e. holographic).
However, this does not change much in the current discussion of wether GEO is limited by holographic noise or not, as Craig Hogan already agreed some time ago, that the low-frequency rise in the noise in GEO would not be holographic noise. Hogans latest prediction is a flat (in frequency spectrum) noise, and we have not yet made an experimental statement about this in GEO.
So in summary:
Mystery noise in GEO disappeared in the region 150-300Hz, but Hogan anyway was not suggesting any more that holographic noise would be limiting GEO at these frequencies since a while.”
April 27th, 2010 at 9:56 am
Even though this idea is gaining momentum due to “noise” that could turn out to have a mundane source,