The holographic universe, an idea born out of the seemingly endless quest to reconcile our understanding of gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature, has raised its head again, with the claim that “significant evidence” has been found that we live in a hologram.
The notion of a holographic universe comes from a mathematical quirk buried in string theory, which is our leading attempt at a theory of everything.
This quirk says that within a particular kind of cosmos, we can effectively do away with troublesome gravity by reducing the number of dimensions in our mathematical description by one. You can think about the resulting universe as information “painted” over a “cosmological surface”, which then permeates into other dimensions, creating the physical cosmos – akin to a hologram, a 3D image created from information in a 2D pattern.
The result of the holographic principle would be that gravity and our third spatial dimension could be regarded as “illusions”.
While recent calculation has shown that the principle might hold in universes like our own, the question on everyone’s lips is, “How would we know?” Unfortunately, our day-to-day experience, with three dimensions of space and one of time, would be the same whether the universe was holographic or not, and we have to look into the realm of the quantum to try to see its impact. But all is not lost. Various attempts are being made to do just this.
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