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A UK, Canadian and Italian study has provided what researchers believe is the first observational evidence that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram.
Theoretical physicists and astrophysicists, investigating irregularities in the cosmic microwave background (the 'afterglow' of the Big Bang), have found there is substantial evidence supporting a holographic explanation of the universe -- in fact, as much as there is for the traditional explanation of these irregularities using the theory of cosmic inflation.
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A holographic universe, an idea first suggested in the 1990s, is one where all the information, which makes up our 3D 'reality' (plus time) is contained in a 2D surface on its boundaries.Professor Kostas Skenderis of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton explains: "Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and your perception of time) in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire universe is encoded!"
So there is a reason you feel like you're living in the Matrix.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 31 2017, @01:50PM
Yeah the journalist coverage is wild (as usual) but I read the actual abstract and they ran a bunch of sims using both a holographic model and the current champion standard model, and sometimes in some situations the holographic models produce a cosmic background radiation pattern that looks more like the real one we've measured, than like the patterns standard model simulations produce. With great steaming piles of handwaving of course.
Although there's a hell of a lot of overlap and the X matches reality a lot more often than Y does, doesn't matter for individual cases like our actual universe. It doesn't matter at all that 99% of the time when you hear hooves its a horse and not a zebra if you're standing in front of the zebra cage at the zoo, or maybe rephrased that 1% of the time it really is an actual zebra it simply doesn't matter that 99% of the time its not. So this paper is dealing with odds and likelihoods not proves and therefores. So nothing has been proven in this specific paper other than you can't rule out the holographic model and if you had to throw money on a roulette table and spin it a zillion times (although we only live in one universe so you get exactly one spin), you'd come out at least slightly ahead if you always bet on holographic rather than standard model.
Or rephrased in a pessimistic sense, say you want to disprove the holographic model, well, try to disprove it by doing something other than simulating the universe and comparing the simulated cosmic background radiation to the standard model simulations, because that sure didn't work. However you disprove it, you're gonna have to disprove it some other way. Its hard to sell negative result scientific papers "Yuppers my alchemy is still not turning lead into gold" isn't going to work in academia. So in that way the paper probably looks weird to people not used to how academic papers deal with negative results. You get used to it after awhile, but it always looks weird. As usual the journalists are dropping acid and coming up with a ridiculous alternative interpretation where the universe is a trippy my little pony hologram on your trapper keeper or holographic universe has been proven or whatever ridiculous crap you'd expect a liberal arts "fake news" grad to shovel out.
I was working on a great SN automobile analogy where you build models of the drivers license manual and DOT policy and economic systems based on looking at a great huge pile of google streetview pictures and then you compare your theoretical model pictures to the actual streetview pics to rule out models until you end up with something vaguely similar to a state drivers license manual and DOT regulations and stuff. And in this specific example some rather peculiar ideas about skyscraper economics seem to fit pictures of streetview skyscrapers we've seen better than the older consensus model. But its getting to be an old story and the car analogy is getting pretty stretched....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @11:43PM
was working on a great SN automobile analogy . . . But its getting to be an old story and the car analogy is getting pretty stretched....
So then, limo?