Our World may be a giant hologram - Page 2

+ Show Spoiler [longer explanation of the picture above] +

The implications are unsettling, to say the least. Sure, quantum mechanics tells us that an object's location can't always be pinpointed. But that applies to things like electrons, not elephants, and it usually spans tiny distances, not light years. It is the large scale that makes this so surprising, Susskind says. In principle, if the black hole is big enough, the two versions of the same elephant could be separated by billions of light years. "People always thought quantum ambiguity was a small-scale phenomenon," he adds. "We're learning that the more quantum gravity becomes important, the more huge-scale ambiguity comes into play."

All this amounts to the fact that an object's location in space-time is no longer indisputable. Susskind calls this "a new form of relativity". Einstein took factors that were thought to be invariable - an object's length and the passage of time - and showed that they were relative to the motion of an observer. The location of an object in space or in time could only be defined with respect to an observer, but its location in space-time was certain. Now that notion has been shattered, says Susskind, and an object's location in space-time depends on an observer's state of motion with respect to a horizon.

What's more, this new type of "non-locality" is not just for black holes. It occurs anywhere a boundary separates regions of the universe that can't communicate with each other. Such horizons are more common than you might think. Anything that accelerates - the Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way - creates a horizon. Even if you're out running, there are regions of space-time from which light would never reach you if you kept speeding up. Those inaccessible regions are beyond your horizon.

As researchers forge ahead in their quest to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, non-locality may help point the way. For instance, quantum gravity should obey the holographic principle. That means there might be redundant information and fewer important dimensions of space-time in the theory. "This has to be part of the understanding of quantum gravity," Giddings says. "It's likely that this black hole information paradox will lead to a revolution at least as profound as the advent of quantum mechanics."
This paradox will lead to a revolution as profound as the birth of quantum mechanics

That's not all. The fact that space-time itself is accelerating - that is, the expansion of the universe is speeding up - also creates a horizon. Just as we could learn that an elephant lurked inside a black hole by decoding the Hawking radiation, perhaps we might learn what's beyond our cosmic horizon by decoding its emissions. How? According to Susskind, the cosmic microwave background that surrounds us might be even more important than we think. Cosmologists study this radiation because its variations tell us about the infant moments of time, but Susskind speculates that it could be a kind of Hawking radiation coming from our universe's edge. If that's the case, it might tell us something about the elephants on the other side of the universe.

On February 07 2010 14:56 dethrawr wrote:
If you're not going to read, then why +1?

tl;dr we are actually living in a flat 2d universe projected like a hologram from a credit card.

Also, suck it up and read it, it takes 5 minutes.

Ie, post the article here, post a summary for the folks with short attention spans, post your take on the situation, etc.

"The key thing is that such experiments are sensitive to changes in the length of the rulers that are far smaller than the diameter of a proton," says Hogan.

On February 09 2010 15:19 ghermination wrote:
while i vaguely understand the concept they're trying to explain, the idea that we are all 3 dimensional projections determined by the interactions of particles at the size of a Planck length is completely pointless, considering it won't effect our day to day lives whatsoever.