Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => New Theories => Topic started by: yor_on on 01/03/2010 12:20:13
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Anyone seen this about a holographic universe (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true&print=true)
I find it hard to accept?
What do you think?
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I just checked in the mirror and I definitely have no "H" on my forehead.
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That's interesting, and it's not really all that weird when you think about it. While we seem to be in no particular place within the universe, at least in spatial terms, in temporal terms we appear to exist in a very specific and important temporal location i.e. right on the temporal boundary.
Simplifying our 4D space-time down to a 2D space-time may make this easier to understand as it enables us to look at the universe from 'outside':
Consider the universe as a circle (but not a disk) that expands over time. We exist at a point on the circumference of the circle (which represents a one-dimensional space) but because it's a circle no point on the circumference is any different from any other point (thus there is no center to our one-dimensional spatial universe). However, because the circle is expanding, all points on the circumference, while being different from each other in spatial terms around the circumference, are at the same point in terms of distance from the center of the circle.
Note that what we're doing here is to transpose the temporal axis onto a spatial axis, so that the circle can be said to have a center. In reality though, the distance from the 'center' is actually a temporal distance and not a spatial one: hence while there is no 'center' of time, time can be said to have an origin and that everything in the universe is at the same temporal distance from it, so we thus actually exist right on the temporal boundary of the universe, equivalent to a 3D surface in a 4D environment, and thus allowing the 'projection' point of view.
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These observations have been around for some time and are very interesting. They also fit well with my pet version of the theory of everything.
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I can cite evidence.
Quite often, when I'm in a restaurant or a retail establishment and I'm trying to obtain service, it is evident that my projection is not functioning properly. I can wave my hands in the air and even stick out my tongue while sticking my thumbs in my ears and wiggling my fingers, but it's obvious that I'm invisible. Next time it happens I'm going to drop my trousers too.
BTW - We should probably move this to the "New Theories" section.
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I think you should. There's no evidence to support this speculation. It's the sort of stuff that causes exasperation and thence budget cuts.
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Hi yor_on, Farsight, graham.d, LeeE, Soul Surfer, Geezer etal,
I think the idea has a lot of merit as expressed by LeeE... though I am not in favor of the idea that spacetime is "fundamentally grainy" at around the Planck Length as the article in New Scientist suggests. This is considered a "magic number" for Loop Quantum Gravity Theories (I really do not like LQG). There is some limited actual experimental data that suggests that the Universe is actually "smooth" around the Planck Length which "more or less" invalidates this concept at that level.
7.3 Billion Years Later, Einstein’s Theory Prevails (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/science/space/29light.html?_r=1)
But why not go with the original idea anyway? I subscribe to the theory that matter waves are what the Universe is composed. An experiment some years back with elliptical quantum corrals showed that a matter wave image of an atom behaves the same as a real atom spectroscopically and can actually combine chemically with other atoms such as oxygen making a "questionable molecule" of the metal oxide composed of real oxygen atoms and a "ghost" metal atom. To me this indicates that matter wave reflections of matter behave just like the original matter.
Secrets of Almaden - An elegant experiment at a Bay Area lab echoes through the world of quantum physics Apr05 2000 (3 pages) (http://www.sfweekly.com/2000-04-05/news/secrets-of-almaden/1)
In a likewise fashion if the holographic principle holds then it might be that real or virtual images reflected in surfaces behave with the same physics which is the same as the external world especially if the virtual universe is "reduced" quasi-optically into a tiny replica of our universe. Notice that I have dropped the granularity in New Scientist's article to make this "trick" work (fortunately there is that confirming experiment). A single fundamental particle such as an electron or even an atomic shell in an atom might be such a matter wave reflector creating a surface that behaves like a reflection in a ball bearing (reduced in size) for the elusive and unseen matter waves. Could it be that these reflections on these elemental surfaces are the reduced analogs of our greater universe or we ... that is ourselves... might we be simply matter wave reflections in these subatomic mirror surfaces. As conjectured in the article these reflections, which are not composed of simple optical waves but of matter waves, may have an independent existence to us and may lead to the existence of parallel universes needed in several real world theories to support quantum processes... a place to stack infinite worlds "reciprocally" into/onto the two dimensional surfaces of the atomic particles who are themselves reflections of other particles, entire planets and galaxies in other higher level worlds and so on "ad infinitem" completing a holographic matter wave image of our reality. Of course this "two dimensional surface" has probably a lot more dimensions but the ability to stack universes onto surfaces is conceptually very 'cool".
The denizens of these "reduced worlds" are confined to the flatspace of the apparent two dimensional surfaces and would not be able to "see" or detect the larger universe around/above them because light which we uses "to see with" would be confined to be in the curved plane of the surface and constrained not leave it as it is in our world... a surface of minimum energy ... like a bubble. What we might one day be able to do is to "magnify" one of these micro universes and inspect what is going on inside the surfaces. It would be one of the possibilities that our Universe might experience in our future or in our past. Matter waves, like gravity, cannot be blocked but they may be imaged since they respond at the de Brogle Wavelength to the equivalent of the Laws of Bragg Diffraction. Mostly this detail is unseen or hidden because of natural "Brownian motion" and the Heisenberg Limit. With matter waves the Heisenberg Limit is related to matter not light quanta and is far far smaller in scale than the optical analog of the Heisenberg relationship and using the right "tools" it just may become possible one day soon. The reciprocal relationship of the matter wave may be "the signal" that the matter particles may exist in reciprocal space.... existing as a Fourier Domain of spatial frequency rather than distance and of temporal frequency (reciprocal time) rather than time. This is because the velocity of the particle is inversely proportional to the wavelength... not proportional.
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fmath%2F6%2F8%2Fa%2F68a5e7c7a5e5c506ed918dd95c43c511.png&hash=7def5bf3353d3583c256650b077f8eda)
Wikipedia: The DeBroglie Einstein Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave#The_de_Broglie_relations)
Notice that reciprocal relationship... T-Duality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-duality) on the scale of matter waves not the Planck Scale. If you think about it the Universe did not just dream up this amazing trick just to amuse a few scientists at IBM Almaden did it???... it must have a "deeper significance" (everything seems to be that way [:D]) and I am betting that this is it!!!
As a reminder... this image is a computer simulation of what IBM found in an imperfect matter wave "lens"... a weaker but still coherent matter wave image of what is at the other focus (click on image of the link above to see enlarged version).
Secrets of Almaden - An elegant experiment at a Bay Area lab echoes through the world of quantum physics Apr05 2000 (3 pages) (http://www.sfweekly.com/2000-04-05/news/secrets-of-almaden/1)
Cheers
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Personally, I don't think that space-time is 'grainy', but that's' not to say that 'grainy' phenomena do not occur in space-time.
Consider a tape measure: space-time is the distance between the marks along the tape measure but is not the tape measure itself, which indeed may have 'grainy' properties. Having measured a distance using our tape measure, does that distance no longer exist when the tape measure is removed? Unfortunately, this experiment can't actually be performed because even if there is no matter in the volume of space that has been measured there will still be EMR passing through it, so in practice it's impossible to remove the tape measure and therefore, the associated granularity from space-time.
I recall reading about matter waves, and their reflection, but I'm not sure how much further they really get us. They seem. to me, to be as ill-defined as our current set of fundamental particles. Part of the problem is, of course, that any top-down analysis of a system can only end with abstract fundamentals, which can only be expressed in terms of themselves, and which is where we are now. Ultimately though, we've got to try to reduce our current set of many abstract fundamentals into a single abstract fundamental (on the basis that any specific number between one and infinity is unreasonable/artificial).
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BTW - We should probably move this to the "New Theories" section.
Hmm... I'm not so sure about that, for it is not just speculation by 'us' but comment upon real experiments and science.
I'm not really too fussed about where it should be though.
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this sounds like evidence that we've reached the limits of our current instrumentation... and wouldn't this also mean that we are both a hologram and a "transparency" for yet another hologram? damn, talk about looking into infinity.
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The space and time may be more grainy (imprecise) than we thought.
Also, someone "outside our universe" will have a different view on us than us inside the universe, just like an observer far away from a black hole sees things different than the falling observer.
But that does not make us holograms.
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You know GoodElf, it reminds me of Russian dolls, that concept. Yes LeeE your analogue is interesting, even if slightly mind-wrecking. As for being a new theory. It's an old theory in fact, I've seen it for a long time, but it craves a holographic approach to reality, and so automatically becomes rather 'esoteric' for us more materialistically inclined. GoodElf and LeeE both seems to feel a certain affinity with it, as well as SoulSurfer though?
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Indeed the universal principle law of light is always relative to the universal principle law of reflection of light(mass="hologram" of light.