Great news: You’re paying for a 1 year experiment to find out if the universe is a hologram

Hotair ^ | 08/28/2014 | Jazz Shaw

[SeekAndFind]

[SeekAndFind]

[GraceG]

I would love to find out the universe is on a “holodeck”...

“Computer, Arch”

[presses several buttons] (beep beep beep)

Computer: “Liberals and Islamists deleted”

[dangerdoc]

All physical reality is just vibration like sound.

Sounds oddly familiar.

[SeekAndFind]

The work sprung out of a long argument with Stephen Hawking about the nature of black holes, which was eventually solved by the realization that the event horizon could act as a hologram, preserving information about the material that’s gotten sucked inside. The same sort of math, it turns out, can actually describe any point in the Universe, meaning that the entire content Universe can be viewed as a giant hologram, one that resides on the surface of whatever two-dimensional shape will enclose it.

[Billthedrill]

A so-called conformal field theory of point particles operates on the 4-d hologram.

I was going to say that. BTT

[Moonman62]

There is reason to believe the Universe could have properties similar to a hologram. This money is well spent, especially compared to other government expenditures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence

[UCANSEE2]

Sounds oddly familiar.

It should.

We are made of particles. All particles vibrate. If they quit vibrating, they no longer exist.

[shibumi]

They could have just asked me.

[rightwingcrazy]

Something is amiss. We’re part of the universe, so presumably we ourselves would be an illusion. An illusion for whom, or what?

[tanknetter]

Rewrite the last sentence: if they end up showing that the universe is a 2-D illusion it will pretty much confirm the existance of a Supreme Being/Creator who built it.

Getting to watch the reaction by Libs and Atheists to the existance of God being proven on a government grant will be worth EVERY penny of taxpayer’s dollars spent.

At least IMHO.

[ZinGirl]

a long argument with Stephen Hawking

so off-topic - but every time I see his name, I think of the line in Big Bang about Hawking's supposed whiney attitude, "Everyone knows Stephen Hawking is such a baby; he should be in a stroller, not a wheelchair".

[cuban leaf]

The answer is in the movie, “The 13th floor”.

[rawcatslyentist]

2D? no.

4D yes

[oh8eleven]

[bigbob]

Money well spent ;-) (compared to lots of other crap)

[I want the USA back]

Scientific American had a feature article on that.
That is not science. By publishing that article, SA has left the field of science and joined the world of pop fluff.
The thesis of the article is based on NOTHING at all. It doesn’t even rise to the level of conjecture.

Like asking if we are really just part of some other-worldly creatures dream, and when it wakes up we will disappear.

Great science-fiction, but not science.

[I want the USA back]

BTW, the “big bang” is not a sufficient explanation for the origin of the universe. Go to work on that, scientists.

[stremba]

This article is quite a bit misleading. (That tends to be common when journalists write articles about science). The point of the holographic universe idea is that it may be possible to make a mathematical model of our 4D (including the time dimension) universe that is 3 dimensional. In no way does this imply that our universe is illusory or that it is any way a hologram in the sense that we normally think of holograms, namely as an unreal image of some object. It merely means that we can simplify models of the universe by eliminating one dimension. This has very little practical impact for just about everyone alive on earth today. It is very exciting for theoretical physicists, however, because it may allow them to simplify the formulation and solution of various theories, and possibly to use those theories to make new testable predictions.