Our world may be a giant hologram (New Scientist)

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MrMark
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18 Jan 2009, 7:51 am

DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... print=true


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18 Jan 2009, 8:13 am

I always suspected this, like this existance is the fake part of reality, as if we control our lives.. From afar? Or something along those lines. But that was just something that could have been part of my imagination.. To find out it is true would be neat :)



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18 Jan 2009, 9:12 am

Wow! Great theory/discovery. So if we're a hologram is there another universe which is "really" 3D?
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18 Jan 2009, 9:50 am

I watched several programmes on the telly on that subject. That the Universe is a hologram and we are all characters in some holographic video game. I find this a strange concept. If your life dont turn out so well the hologram could be created again like someone playing a video game again :?:



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18 Jan 2009, 10:47 am

Holo victory topic

So who is the master Hologrammist? Who created the programme? Are we on a cosmic holodeck? I seem to recall on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that there was some sort of Heisenberg principle involved in Holodeck "reality."

Interesting and disturbing at the same time. 8)


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18 Jan 2009, 1:59 pm

the matrix has been detected? 8O


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18 Jan 2009, 2:31 pm

Image


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Tracker
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18 Jan 2009, 7:27 pm

No, you are confusing hologram as used in its correct technical sense in this article with the holograms from star trek.

This world is not being run as a computer simulation. This is not proof of the matrix.

Holograms are merely 2-dimensional surfaces that project a 3-dimensional image. For example, the hologram on your credit card looks 3 dimensional when it is really on a flat surface.

This article stipulates that the universe is a sphere 13 billion light years in radius, expanding at the speed of light. On the surface of this sphere is tiny quantum ripples. These quantum ripples combine with each other to project a hologram inside of this sphere (aka the known universe). What we experience as reality is nothing more then the changing quantum ripples on the surface of the universe projecting into it. As we interact with our universe and move things around, we change the quantum ripples on the surface of the universe, and that changes the hologram that we see.

Overall, there is nothing fake about our 3-D universe, it is just that the actual quantum interactions are occurring far away and being projected into the universe. Its like having a conversation over the phone, while you may not actually be next to the person, the conversation is still real.



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18 Jan 2009, 8:01 pm

I read the article, thank you.
I was joking.


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ouinon
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19 Jan 2009, 10:36 am

Tracker wrote:
The universe is a sphere 13 billion light years in radius, expanding at the speed of light. On the surface of this sphere is tiny quantum ripples. These quantum ripples combine with each other to project a hologram inside of this sphere (aka the known universe). What we experience as reality is nothing more then the changing quantum ripples on the surface of the universe projecting into it. As we interact with our universe and move things around, we change the quantum ripples on the surface of the universe, and that changes the hologram that we see. Overall, there is nothing fake about our 3-D universe, it is just that the actual quantum interactions are occurring far away and being projected into the universe.

Thank you for explaining it. That helps a bit in making sense of what it means. :)

But I don't understand how our interactions, "moving things around", etc, have an effect on the ripples on the surface. :?

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matsuiny2004
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22 Jan 2009, 5:48 am

ouinon wrote:
Tracker wrote:
The universe is a sphere 13 billion light years in radius, expanding at the speed of light. On the surface of this sphere is tiny quantum ripples. These quantum ripples combine with each other to project a hologram inside of this sphere (aka the known universe). What we experience as reality is nothing more then the changing quantum ripples on the surface of the universe projecting into it. As we interact with our universe and move things around, we change the quantum ripples on the surface of the universe, and that changes the hologram that we see. Overall, there is nothing fake about our 3-D universe, it is just that the actual quantum interactions are occurring far away and being projected into the universe.

Thank you for explaining it. That helps a bit in making sense of what it means. :)

But I don't understand how our interactions, "moving things around", etc, have an effect on the ripples on the surface. :?

.


I think he is talking about entanglement. think about it as humans only appear to be seperate, but are not.


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22 Jan 2009, 11:19 am

So they found out that the universe runs on 1080p resolution?

PS: I hate the term "1080p", but used it because a great deal of people here would understand it better than stuff like WHUXGA (which is actually several orders of magnitude larger than a 1080p image...)



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22 Jan 2009, 1:57 pm

ToadOfSteel wrote:
So they found out that the universe runs on 1080p resolution?

PS: I hate the term "1080p", but used it because a great deal of people here would understand it better than stuff like WHUXGA (which is actually several orders of magnitude larger than a 1080p image...)


Id just like to comment that WHUXGA is the most awesome word Ive heard today.



ouinon
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23 Jan 2009, 4:20 am

matsuiny2004 wrote:
ouinon wrote:
I don't understand how our interactions, "moving things around", etc, can have an effect on the ripples on the surface.
I think he is talking about entanglement. Think about it as humans only appear to be separate, but are not.

But the whole point about a hologram is that the 3-D image doesn't do anything unless the 2-D "base" "tells" it to, and nothing that you try to do to the 3-D image affects it in the slightest, only what the 2-D base does alters anything.

The 3-D image should, if the universe is like a hologram, not have any effect on what other parts of the image do, except when those other parts are instructed by the 2-D base to "be affected" in that way.

Even if humans are "entangled"/intricately linked parts of one huge system, ( as I actually believe we are ), that would not explain how we, the 3-D image, could affect anything about the 2-D foundation, ( or the rest of the universe/3-D image except in so far as the 2-D base "told it" to be affected ). Or?

:? :?:

.