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[Croquantes]

Well, the thread on evolution/god thread reminded me of this piece of news which I read a few weeks back and summarily forgot. I don't really understand most of the article, but I'm proud of myself for reading the whole bloody thing. I'm worried I might have come to some wrong conclusions though...

Does it really mean anything, or change anything if we know we live in a holographic universe? Could someone translate the science-speak into stupid-speak?

Here's a quote from the article:

"The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface."

if you want to read more, you have to sign up
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true

Edit: I found an alternate website which is interesting and explains a bit about what a holographic universe entails, but I can't tell if it's full of half-truths and pseudoscience
http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.html

[Siquo]

Can't read, have to pay.

Holograms do have on interesting property: Every part holds the information of the whole.

If you break a hologram in two, you get two identical, smaller, less detailed versions of the first one. If that applies to our universe... *goes on a tangent here and won't be back for a while*

[Yanlin]

Oh boy... Another one...

[Croquantes]

Can't read, have to pay.

It's free to sign up and read the article, you just have to go through the whole sign-up process which is a pain.

edit: nevermind. free access seems to expire after a certain amount of time. I can't read it now either.

[Cthulhu]

Your title is kind of deceptive.  It's possible we live in a hologram, but that doesn't mean we do. 

Even if we do, I don't think it matters.  We should just live our lives.

[Croquantes]

I don't know. If someone could prove that we do live in a holographic universe, it certainly would affect our worldview. After all, if our reality is holographic, then our objective reality does not really exist. On top of that, we'd need to reform scientific method.

"A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to [our modern scientific] approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something."

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

source http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.htm]http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.htm]http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.htm

Everything we do really does take place on a 2D plane on the edge of the universe, but our physical reality is the 3D projected image of that 2D plane.

[JoshuaFH]

I don't quite get what you're talking about, quite honestly.

Though, that could be because I'm quite dense.

But if I had to guess... you're saying that we live in the Matrix?

[Mr Tk]

I thought the idea of it was that you could treat the universe as a 2d image 'the hologram' if you will to be able to perform equations that in 3d would be much more complex?

[Croquantes]

From the newscientist article which I can no longer access (but stole from page that was linking to it as well^^). There really is a lot about this topic that can't really be accurately described in plain language to those without science degrees.

"When light bounces off holograms, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface."

“If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.”

“Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry.”

[Virex]

I get the concept, but what prompted them to think of this option in the first place? It has to have some explanatory value or else they'd not considered it.

[Duke 2.0]

 I'll just take it as breaking the universe in half will create two exact copies of it.

 Now if you excuse me, the Reality Cracker needs to be primed.

[Rilder]

Obviousy you have to make it a daily habit to scream out "COMPUTER END PROGRAM"  Or "COMPUTER, ARCH"  or "Computer, Initiate Self destruct sequence, authorization *last name* Pie One One Alpha"

[Ohaeri]

I get the concept, but what prompted them to think of this option in the first place? It has to have some explanatory value or else they'd not considered it.

Not necessarily. Sometimes there's a lag between innovation in ideas and innovation in practicality. I'm struggling to come up with a suitable example because my mind has blanked . . . the only one I can think of is Galileo's initial work with gravity. Sure, his observations didn't change anything; they just caused others to look at things differently and realize that the world didn't work quite in the way people would expect it to (until that time, Aristotle's view that light things fell slower was in vogue; in reality, mass has nothing to do with acceleration). But out of his work we got nice things like Einstein's work with relativity. You never know what a paradigm shift will cause later on down the line.

[Il Palazzo]

"A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to [our modern scientific] approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something."


Everything we do really does take place on a 2D plane on the edge of the universe, but our physical reality is the 3D projected image of that 2D plane.

See guys, it might mean that Plato was right afterall!

[Rilder]

See guys, it might mean that Plato was right afterall!

Greeks were right about alot of things. 

_{ROMANS BE SAPPIN MAH GREECE.}