You may have read today that the entire universe is a giant hologram. Maybe your mind was blown while you hit your Big Bong and contemplated a 2D universe, or that researchers had somehow found substantial evidence you were “living in an illusion.”
No, nope. Not what happened. Rather, physicists figured out that one of their models doesn’t break when they apply data from the real universe. Which is still awesome, but not insane.
Theoretical physicists try to understand the Big Bang and how the universe ended up the way it is today. One theory scraps a spatial dimension to better describe the strange behavior of the early universe. Now, an international group of physicists found they could recreate actual physical data collected on our universe using this 2D holographic model.
“It’s holographic in the sense that there’s a description of the universe based on a lower dimensional system consistent with everything we see from the Big Bang,” Niayesh Afshordi, the study’s first author from the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute in Canada, told Gizmodo.
Unfortunately, the theory explaining how massive things work, general relativity, doesn’t fit nicely with the theory of how tiny things work, quantum mechanics. That especially sucks when you’re trying to describe the early universe, where literally all mass and energy was balled up in a tiny space. One theory trying to reconcile the two, quantum gravity, says that if you ditch a spatial dimension, you can also ditch gravity in your calculations to make things easier.
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