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Holographic Universe Theory

2K views 18 replies 10 participants last post by  Paulie 
#1 ·
I thought it might be time to stake a claim in the science section, so here I am.

Thanks to the flat earth thread this morning, I got to thinking and reading about related ideas. Something new I found intriguing is the Holographic Universe theory.

There's been a theory kicking around for several decades now suggesting that the universe itself may be a hologram.
The 1982 book by Ken Wilber, Holographic Paradigm, for example, tells of the way psychologist Karl Pribram and physicist David Bohm both arrived at the notion of a "holographic universe" in which things that appear to be solid are not necessarily so, Paul Czysz, a professor emeritus of aerospace engineering with St. Louis University, told TechNewsWorld.
The Holographic Universe: Is Our 3D World Just an Illusion? | Science | TechNewsWorld


So, what do you know about this theory? I'm interested to hear of things you may have heard or read relating to this.

Personally, I don't think this is all a hologram as we understand a hologram to be (or illusion, as some people put it). It's conceivable though that our universe is something similar. It's hard for me to put into words the raw ideas in my head.
 
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#3 ·
Let me just say that I freaking love David Bohm. A lot of people haven't heard of him, but he's right up there with Einstein and Feynman. It's important to know that the first half of Bohm's life was dedicated to theoretical physics. During the second half of his life, however, he became very interested in Eastern thought and became close friends with Krishnamurti, who was a spiritual teacher of sorts. As a result, Bohm became interested in ideas that weren't accepted by mainstream science. The holographic universe is one such idea, though I think his idea of a holographic universe is actually different than what a lot of modern books/articles are talking about. I'd like to think that Bohm always came up with new ideas from the point of view of physics (i.e., the ideas made sense and weren't purely speculative), but it's hard to say. He was a complicated man.

Anyway, this is all very interesting, but there needs to be a lot more research before we can draw any conclusions.
 
#4 ·
I'd be very interested to see, when the Holometer is finally built, what its results are in terms of measuring holographic noise. I won't for a second pretend to know the first thing about any of this, yet I do find it strangely compelling. I've sent this link, Fermilab | Holometer | Holometer Frequently Asked Questions, to a physicist friend of mine to see what he thinks.


From Wikipedia: In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire
universe can be seen as a two-dimensional information structure "painted" on the cosmological horizon, such that the three dimensions we observe are an effective description only at macroscopic scales and at low energies. Cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, partly because the cosmological horizon has a finite area and grows with time.

From Fermilab: First, when physicists say the universe is "really" two-dimensional, they don't mean the third dimension doesn't exist. Rather they mean it's an emergent rather than fundamental property of spacetime. If you zoom in far enough, a solid doesn't look very solid at all, but this doesn't make "solid" any less real or valid a category for describing our day-to-day experience. Similarly, the claim is that at some scale, spacetime can be described mathematically using two dimensions instead of three, and as you approach the scale of everyday life, it begins to look increasingly three-dimensional.

Second, the term "holographic" unfortunately calls to mind words like "illusion" and "simulation" which really have nothing to do with the Holometer or any aspect of the Holographic Principle. The notion that our familiar three-dimensional universe is somehow encoded in two dimensions at the most fundamental level does not imply that there is anybody or anything "outside" the two-dimensional representation, "projecting" the illusion or "running" the simulation. The Holometer may or may not find evidence of holographic noise. But it's a pretty safe bet that it will not call into question the reality or meaning of your life.

None the less, I'm intrigued now.
 
#5 ·
I found this article strangely unqualified--what does it mean to be an illusion? A perception of something which does not exist? In the sense that atoms are mostly empty space? But they're just *mostly empty space, so we're simply perceiving the portion of them which isn't empty, right? Aside from this, just because something isn't solid, it doesn't follow that we shouldn't be able to perceive it i.e. liquids, gasses, plasma can all be perceived. There wasn't enough substance here to understand what they mean by the second sense of holography e.g. the cosmos is a hologram of the illusion created by space time itself. What the blasted hell can that mean?
 
#6 ·
So my rocket scientist buddy is likening this to a much earlier attempt to measure Earth's movement through "aether", the first experiment utilizing an interferometer, one designed by Michelson himself. As an optician, I know that interference is the theory behind an anti-reflection lens coating's ability to increase light transmission, but that's an aside. Here is the original experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment It was a failure but from it was born what we now call the wave-particle duality of light, the accepted version of how light travels, i.e., sometimes as a wave, sometimes as a particle. It will be interesting to see what results, if anything, this Fermilab Holometer produces. If there is some semblance of an equivalent dual wave-particle theory as it pertains to space and time, which is I think what they may be aiming for, the effort will be well worth the cost. I prefer not to think of myself as a "painted on" 3 dimensional image, but we may not have a choice.
 
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#9 ·
So my rocket scientist buddy...
Wow, thanks for forwarding this on and sharing what you got back!

is likening this to a much earlier attempt to measure Earth's movement through "aether", the first experiment utilizing an interferometer, one designed by Michelson himself. As an optician, I know that interference is the theory behind an anti-reflection lens coating's ability to increase light transmission, but that's an aside. Here is the original experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson–Morley_experiment It was a failure but from it was born what we now call the wave-particle duality of light, the accepted version of how light travels, i.e., sometimes as a wave, sometimes as a particle. It will be interesting to see what results, if anything, this Fermilab Holometer produces. If there is some semblance of an equivalent dual wave-particle theory as it pertains to space and time, which is I think what they may be aiming for, the effort will be well worth the cost. I prefer not to think of myself as a "painted on" 3 dimensional image, but we may not have a choice.
Yeah, this all very interesting and I like to play with ideas like this in my head. Still, it's going to be hard to accept when I have to rush to the hospital because that holographic concrete block broke my holographic flesh and bone toe and now I'm bleeding holographic blood out all over the place. I'm pretty sure any pain I'd be feeling at the time, I'll be wishing it was all an illusion...lol.

Who knows, even if it is a complete failure, maybe we'll get something else useful of it like you mentioned with the Michelson-Morely experiement.
 
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#7 ·
If you can feel and see something perfectly it's not a hologram, not to mention there's no proof the universe is a hologram.
 
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#11 ·
Just as a clarification, the words "hologram" and "illusion" are being used very loosely in the various articles written about this topic. This research isn't suggesting that the universe is literally a hologram. In simplest terms, it's saying that what happens inside of a 3-D volume of space is actually encoded on the surface of that volume. In other words, for a sphere, if you know what's happening on the surface of that sphere, then you know what's going on inside that sphere. The word "hologram" actually means something a bit different in mathematics/physics.
 
#14 ·
More importantly would a Roman Catholic priest caught with an altar boy in such a universe be a hollow hallow holohomo in a holohollow?
 
#15 ·
Holographic Universe my ass what a load of Bullshit. People believe it because it´s Mainstream but when they see something on the Internet that the Moon is a Hologram the call it Conspiracy from some nutjobs not realizing the Holographic Universe is no different.
 
#17 ·
When it comes to the basic idea—the Universe can be described using a hologram—the panel was pretty much uniform, and Susskind clearly felt there was a consensus in its favor. But, he noted, as soon as you stepped beyond the basics, everybody had their own ideas, and those started coming out as the panel went along.
Seems like that's the main problem so far. Lots of ideas, less facts.

The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which conjectures that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole might be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory.[SUP][6][/SUP] However, there exist classical solutions to the Einstein equations that allow values of the entropy larger than those allowed by an area law, hence in principle larger than those of a black hole. These are the so-called "Wheeler's bags of gold". The existence of such solutions is in conflict with the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the holographic principle are not yet fully understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

 
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