It's crazy to think we are the universe observing and trying to understand itself. Matter organised in a certain way is able to observe itself? How weird is that!
Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach) refers to this as a "strange loop".
Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
91–100 of 197 posts
Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
#92It'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.
That's an interesting observation! Perhaps next we are going to learn that everything is - as the Buddhists keep teaching - indeed "one". I am saying this only half-jokingly. One thing you can derive from the statement that everything is one is that everything we can think of also includes what we would call the opposite of what we're thinking of . And thus it would be correct to say that the universe has many dimensions but it is also true that it has very few dimensions. This surely sounds somewhat anti-intellectual but it'll be fascinating to see if science will ever be able to come up with something more meaningful, i.e. something which is less contradicting.
Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
#93It's crazy to think we are the universe observing and trying to understand itself. Matter organised in a certain way is able to observe itself? How weird is that!
"God is consciousness, and we are all god trying to realize our full potential." --Hicks
Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
#94It'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.
The holographic universe theory is derived from string theory. Specifically ADS/CFT correspondence:
Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
#95I've recently been thinking on how our human definition of intelligence might relate to holographic principles, particularly in regards to information theory. We are small creatures, but our networks -- our brains and societies -- represent the most complex information-encoding geometries we've yet seen in the universe. And I see the way that our curiosity reaches upward in scale, documenting the far corners and fold…
Haha, beautifully put, but I often wonder the opposite. What if our capacity to perceive and think is so limited and narrow that most of the underlying workings of reality are completely missed by us? The what if being, we are not so special as we think. The way an ant colony will bustle full of self-import and purpose, blissfully unaware of the giant people passing by. And the people pay it no mind, because they can…
Mix those thoughts with a healthy does of "human values don't necessarily have any relation to alien values, which may be just as incomprehensible to humanity as the true nature of the universe" and you've basically got the Cosmic Horror fiction genre.
Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
#96Possibly 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…
Can anyone illuminate what relationship, if any, this has to anti-deSitter space? Both seem to deal with lower-to-higher 'projections' of spacetime but I've struggled to find a good intro to AdS.
Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
#97I've recently been thinking on how our human definition of intelligence might relate to holographic principles, particularly in regards to information theory. We are small creatures, but our networks -- our brains and societies -- represent the most complex information-encoding geometries we've yet seen in the universe. And I see the way that our curiosity reaches upward in scale, documenting the far corners and fold…
I think that the information-mania you describe is a quirk of a certain personality type, not a basic human phenomenon. Information is certainly important to humans, but this omnivorous "insatiable drive" is not, I think, foundationally human, nor universal, nor even necessarily entirely present in the personality type that believes it posses such a drive.
Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
#98I'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'?
Think about it in terms of (dramatically oversimplified) category theory:
You can think of the rules of physics as requiring 4 parameters to specify things like position, momentum, etc -- (x,y,z,t). Imagine that you have a category of states in that space, and the physical laws are functions that take states to other states in that same category.
Now imagine you have some functor which takes those states and translates them to a new space that only requires only (x,y,t) to specify them, and translates the functions so that they now take those states to other states in that 2 spatial dimension category. And there's a one-to-one correspondence, so you can move back and forth between the two categories. So if you have states A and B in 3d and A' and B' in 2d, You can go from A to A' to B' and back to B and it's the same as going from A to B.
It turns out that the physical laws in the 3d category have gravity, and the ones in the 2d category might not. But the laws still correspond one-to-one.
The reason this is useful is that figuring out quantum gravity is really hard, and it might be easier to figure out the functor that translates 3d physics into 2d physics that lacks gravity, perform the calculations there, and then translate the result back to 3d physics.
Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
#99Very relevant: http://rense.com/general69/holoff.htm
Re: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
#100This shows how philosophy is rather important when trying to come to an understanding.
Different philosophy can result in different theory of explanation and different direction of model building.