Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

sciencebulletin.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 197 posts

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#61

Post by Florin_Andrei »

blincoln wrote: post #51

Possibly dumb question, but I know my niece is going to ask me about this, and I'd like to be able to give her a solid response: does this mean that most distances within our universe are illusory? If not, why not? To expand on that thought a little bit, with a hologram, the projected object is an illusion, and can be made to appear to move at arbitrary speed by e.g. rotating the projection apparatus. On a larger sca…

Distances are "illusory" to some extent anyway. On a large scale, relativity makes both time and space dependent somewhat on other factors. On a small scale, quantum mechanics similarly de-absolutizes position (space) and momentum.

Space and time as absolutes appear to be a construct, a consequence of us being highly complex neural networks trained at a specific scale of the Universe - the "human scale" - as beings about 1 ... 2 meters in size. Absolute time and absolute space appear to be very real on this scale. But as soon as you leave this order of magnitude, and climb either up or down on the scale of things, this turns out to be mere provinciality.

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#62

Post by VLM »

PaulAJ wrote: post #29
neals wrote: post #18

I'm having some trouble understanding this sentence: " [...] our 3-D ‘reality’ (plus time) is contained in a 2-D surface on its boundaries." What, exactly, do they mean with 'on its boundries'?

I'm familiar with the idea of coordinate transforms and projections, so I get the idea that you could project our 3D universe onto a 2D surface, and I kind of see how a hologram encodes 3D information, but I don't see how that is a useful idea. Or are there only certain kinds of 4D information that can be encoded in the 2D surface, so our 4D model of space and time gets reduced to a theory of only 2 dimensions? Are t…

Having only read the abstract (so I might have it totally wrong) we have the 2D holographic picture from the cosmic microwave background already and we're trying to fit that data to various theories. The cool kid theory used to revolve around dark matter in some way I'm a little unclear on. If you run a bunch of simulations on imaginary 4D universes playing games with the usual cosmological parameters, sometimes with some parameter settings processing the results as a holographic projection gives better match to the pix we already have, than stuff done that relies on dark matter and things. Quantum field theory mixes into this which is interesting because that usually applies to little things not the shape of the universe size stuff.

I'm working on an automobile analogy but its not easy.

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#63

Post by JamesLeonis »

billionsfan1 wrote: post #55

While not conclusive, does this not sound like support for what could be Intelligent Design - ID? 'Patterns imprinted in it carry information about the very early Universe and seed the development of structures of stars and galaxies in the late time Universe.' [From the Bulletin] If the universe is encoded on a 2d surface and has been projected on 3d, doesn't that sound like some design/intentional purpose encoded on…

No. This emerged from studying what happens when stuff falls into black holes.

In physics, all matter can be described as having "information" or "state" that describes itself. That information can't be destroyed. However, a questions about how matter's information was preserved in a black hole led to math equations that describe how that information is "encoded" onto the black hole's event horizon. As a funny side effect, those equations also happened to describe everywhere else in the universe, leading physicists to look around and ask themselves, "Are we holograms too?"

In this way, the Hologram theory states that all matter is really information on a 2D surface, and that "we" are the 3D holographic projection of that information.

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#64

Post by d0mine »

Osmium wrote: post #58

Question, from someone who does not understand the Holographic universe idea: If 'true', is the holographic universe 'merely' a mathematical tool that helps us solve problems, or is it a description of an objective reality, and the universe is 'really' a 2D surface, and our 3D perception is somehow illusory? I understand this is partly a philosophy of science question, but would be interested to hear an expert opinio…

All models are wrong. If a model is not wrong; it is called reality. http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/57407/what-is-the-m...

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#65

Post by Florin_Andrei »

Osmium wrote: post #58

Question, from someone who does not understand the Holographic universe idea: If 'true', is the holographic universe 'merely' a mathematical tool that helps us solve problems, or is it a description of an objective reality, and the universe is 'really' a 2D surface, and our 3D perception is somehow illusory? I understand this is partly a philosophy of science question, but would be interested to hear an expert opinio…

> is the holographic universe 'merely' a mathematical tool that helps us solve problems, or is it a description of an objective reality

Some would say there is no meaningful difference between those two. E.g. Max Tegmark in 'Our Mathematical Universe'.

I'm not saying he's necessarily right, I'm just pointing out that such a viewpoint exists.

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#66

Post by Florin_Andrei »

TwoFactor wrote: post #17

It's interesting that to a layman this seems like almost the exact opposite of what string theory proposes dimensionally. Holographic universe theory is stating there are effectively less dimensions, while string theory shows there could be significantly more.

You mean spatial dimensions. But space and time appear to be derivative notions anyway.

What really matters is the space of independent parameters (or, if truly independent parameters do not exist, then the truly fundamental ones). That would be really nice to figure out one day.

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#67

Post by bermanoid »

VanillaCafe wrote: post #57

Consider a mathematical spherical construct that contains more than the the r^2 amount of entropy than can be described by the Holographic Principle. What makes that not possible under the theory? What breaks down? Is there a physical analogy for it?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle:

'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 conflicts with the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the holographic principle are not yet fully understood.'

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#68

Post by vidarh »

billionsfan1 wrote: post #55

While not conclusive, does this not sound like support for what could be Intelligent Design - ID? 'Patterns imprinted in it carry information about the very early Universe and seed the development of structures of stars and galaxies in the late time Universe.' [From the Bulletin] If the universe is encoded on a 2d surface and has been projected on 3d, doesn't that sound like some design/intentional purpose encoded on…

Why? It doesn't seem to bear any kind of relevance either way.

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#69

Post by Xcelerate »

Osmium wrote: post #58

Question, from someone who does not understand the Holographic universe idea: If 'true', is the holographic universe 'merely' a mathematical tool that helps us solve problems, or is it a description of an objective reality, and the universe is 'really' a 2D surface, and our 3D perception is somehow illusory? I understand this is partly a philosophy of science question, but would be interested to hear an expert opinio…

Imagine performing a molecular dynamics simulation. Your simulation occurs in a 3D box, and if you visualize it, it looks three dimensional, but the way the information processing works is that you have a list of atom coordinates stored next to each other in one dimensional RAM.

It's kind of the same thing with the holographic idea. Information locality is 2D (information is "near" other information as if it were on a two dimensional plane), but our perception is that of a 3D universe.

(Standard disclaimer about loose analogies not reproducing mathematical equations...)

Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

#70

Post by VLM »

allemagne wrote: post #45
nabla9 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holographic means that the universe appears 3d but is actually 2d. 'appears' means that for us it is three dimensional. 'actually' means that the amount of stuff universe can hold is limited by 2d surface area, not 3d volume. Information/matter contained in universe is in '2d container surface' while interactions between them seem to happen in 3d universe. In other words, the information/matter you can keep in volume…

Is it misunderstanding things to say that we're like data on a computer? So from my perspective, two atoms on my body are right next to each other. However, they could be theoretically encoded on opposite ends of the universe's 2d surface?

The analogy no one wants to state in public (because its partially wrong) is holography is like Fourier transforms or x-ray crystallography.

Today everyone is very chill with using FT to convert say a pile of voltage and time measurements into frequency/phase and power, and back again, and manipulate either side to see how the other side wiggles in response. This is all basic EE stuff this is how your DSP or software defined radio works (well, not exactly but close enough)

Photo negative human scale holograms use monochromatic light to store all kinds of interference pattern stuff into splotches of black and white. If we were (are?) smart enough we could print out something on photo paper and shine a laser on it and a hologram would appear.

Another analogy which is pretty decent is its like x-ray crystallography where about half a century ago a popular use of computers was to take a crystalline material and shine xrays thru it making a very modern art ish looking photo of holographic interference patterns (sorta) which would be analyzed by a computer to reverse the transform and turn it back into a 3-d model of the atoms in the crystal.

So a lot of this is almost cryptographic hash like in that flipping a couple bits on one side almost always results in a huge change on the other side.

So if instead of talking about atoms you take a film and laser hologram of two coffee cups the splotchy hologram film doesn't really have a concept anymore of two coffee cups next to each other, you can't point to a splotch and say thats the cup on the left. You definitely can't slice the film in half and project each and expect one cup on each half, probably you'll have two holograms each with two coffee cups and 3 dB or so worse signal to noise ratio.

Badly mixing analogies its like running a crypto algo on 2 bytes of data and asking where exactly the two bytes are in the output. Well, um, if the crypto algo is anything better than ROT13 they're both kinda smeared everywhere across the output of the algo.

Really badly mixing analogies its like taking a .scad file storing a 3d object (or stl or cad program of your choice) and encoding it into one of those legacy 2-D QR codes and then asking where in the QR code can you see your 3-d object ...

The whole point of this is we kinda sorta have a 2-d holographic picture of the cosmic background radiation sorta. Its a very distinct picture. So whatever crazy simulations we try, we'd best make sure if you hologram-ify the cosmic background radiation, it best look similar to what our telescope have already seen. Kind of like stellar astrophysics isn't just making stuff up, your theories better match what spectrum analysis of star light often actually looks like, if your nifty stellar astrophysics theory predicts Sirius is a red giant or a black hole or something then your theory is messed up because we have lots of data about the real Sirius as opposed to theoretical models.

Post reply on HN