[New Scientist]The universe might be a giant hologram

I read this book years ago. Most of it is quite abstract (duh), but it's understandable...

 

Very interesting - I hope that they can prove this enough to warrant funding for a stand-alone detector.

 

I find this all to be very hollow

 

I'd like to add this:

Centries ago "we" thought that an atom was the smallest matter that everything was made out of. Decades ago, we came up with the idea of electrons, protons and neutrons, and said them to the be smallest matters that made up everything. In the most recent history, scientist have identified quarks to be the smallerst unit of matter. They say that quarks make up protons and neutrons (3 quarks per). They, the scientists now are not even sure what electrons are, or if they even exist since they cannot predict or "nail" their locations around the nuclous.

So it seems to me like science is ever trying to find the smallest unit of matter. But there is a new branch of science that suggest that matter in fact does not exits. It truly is only energy like Einstein said. I think this is similar to string theory which says that all matter is only vibrations or such.

Ok I'm tired of typing now.

 

LOLOLOLOOLDENG

THATS WHAT SHE SAID! :grin:

 

LOL best reply ever. Are you that Swoly-D guy everyone talks about?

 

Uh oh be careful there raider boy, once mayzar has you in his sights...

 

so my life is pretty much this game?

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what if the universe was a giant ho

 

Your mom is not the universe.

 

my mom is not a garden utensil

 

garden untensil

=

Spoiler

You mom

=

Spoiler

Spoiler

haha just kidding, that was a fat boy

 

You have no idea what you're talking about here. The reason we can't "nail" the locations of electrons is that they are quantum particles. That doesn't call into question at whether or not they exist. They certainly do exist.

As for matter not existing, matter and energy are two sides of the same coin. That's not a new idea, it goes all the way back to Einstein.

 

The universe is an illusion and you're telling me I have to pay my taxes?

 

You dont have to. Also feel free to pick up that illusory bar of soap during your 10 year stint for tax evasion.

 

I guess that explains why my teams always get screwed over..

 

very interesting read. From what I understand it has been theorized for a long time that space time was quantum in nature as if it was continuous we would have the paradox that nothing would ever happen as there would be an infinity inbetween each moment. I think one of the ancient Greeks had termed that paradox but I don't remeber the name. Its pretty amazing that now we are possibly detecting that quantum nature.

[rquoter]
Our world may be a giant hologram

Susskind and 't Hooft's remarkable idea was motivated by ground-breaking work on black holes by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely "black" but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox.

Bekenstein's work provided an important clue in resolving the paradox. He discovered that a black hole's entropy - which is synonymous with its information content - is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. This is the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for infalling matter or light. Theorists have since shown that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates.

Crucially, this provides a deep physical insight: the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole - not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram. Susskind and 't Hooft extended the insight to the universe as a whole on the basis that the cosmos has a horizon too - the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe. What's more, work by several string theorists, most notably Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has confirmed that the idea is on the right track. He showed that the physics inside a hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is the same as the physics taking place on the four-dimensional boundary.[/rquoter]

If I remember my Hawking right the Hawking radiation is caused by virtual particles, particles that appear out of the vacuum randomly and usually instantly anhilate each other, where the virtual pair is split and one half gets sucked into the black hole while the other particle radiates out as Hawking radiation. The particle that falls into the black hole anhilates part of the black hole so over time the black hole dissolves. I had remembered reading that theoretically it was possible to tell something about the interior of the black hole based upon the Hawking radiation but not following this stuff regularly I can accept that the explanation that the Hawking radiation might not.

On a related note the universe might also be very similar to black holes as theorectically the density of a black hole decreases as it gets larger. According to theory a black hole the size of the universe would have the same density as a the universe so the universe could be one big black hole.

 

Does this mean I can stop paying my bills?

 

Just imagine... we're probably living in the hollow spot on the top right:



And before anyone says so: "that's NO MOON."

Go LongHorns!

That's what She Said!

 

That is exactly what I am talking about. One could say that you sir have no idea what you're talking about. Today, we all believe that electrons exist because we have observed them through scientific experiments with boundaries. We cannot see them but we can indirecly observe them. Who knows for sure what electrons really are?

I will now stop before I make myself sound more stupid 'cause I'm not.