The year 1982 was marked by an event that turned the world of physics upside down. Alan Aspect and the research team have presented to the public an experiment that can be considered one of the most significant experiments carried out in the 20th century.
Aspect and the group were able to discover that under certain conditions elementary particles- electrons are able to interact with each other instantly. It doesn't matter how far apart they are. The discovery is stunning, but it calls into question Einstein's theory that the limiting speed of interaction is equal to the speed of light. As we know that the speed of light is the highest speed on our planet and in space.
David Bohm, a physicist at the University of London, believes that the discovery of the Aspect shook the idea of \u200b\u200bperceiving the world as a whole. Real reality simply does not exist, and what we are accustomed to perceive as an objective reality is nothing but a huge three-dimensional hologram, which has an obvious density.
What is a hologram and its amazing properties
A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph made with a laser. To make a hologram, it is necessary to illuminate an object with one laser, and the second laser, emitting a beam, will add up with the light reflected from the object, and fix the interference pattern on the film. A holographic image looks like alternating white stripes with black ones. But when the image is illuminated with a laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the object that was captured appears.Hologram
Three-dimensionality is not the only amazing property of a hologram. You know, if a hologram is cut in half and illuminated, then each half will reproduce the original image. You can cut the hologram into small pieces and each will reproduce the whole image. The hologram has become a stumbling block in the matter of the orderliness of the world. By constantly cutting the hologram, we will always get the original image of a smaller size.
Holographic world
David Bohm suggests that elementary particles interact with each other at any distance not because of unusual properties, but because the distance is only an illusion. He says that at some level, elementary particles cease to be separate objects, but become part of something huge and fundamental.
Bohm offered a model that would make it easier to understand his thoughts. Imagine that you are watching a fish tank. At the same time, you cannot see the entire aquarium, only two screens are available to you, which are located on the side and in front of the aquarium. If you look at the screens separately, you can conclude that the observation takes place over two objects. But, if you continue to watch, you will notice that there is a relationship between the fish on the two screens. As soon as the first fish changes position, the second also changes position, in accordance with the first. It turns out that one fish is observed in front, the second in profile. If at the same time you remain in the dark that this is an aquarium as a whole, then the idea will come to your mind that the fish communicate with each other in an amazing way.
Such a perception can be transferred to the Aspect experiment, there is a superluminal interaction between particles, there is a level of reality that is not yet available to humans, because we perceive the world as an aquarium with fish. Only a part of reality is available to us, parts are not parts, they are components of a holographic deep unity. Everything that is contained in physical reality is in a huge holographic image, a projection.
If we continue to reason further, we can conclude that in the universe all objects are interconnected. It turns out that the electrons of our brain are connected with the electrons of every beating heart, every shining star. Everything is interpenetrating, and the desire of a person to divide and dismember everything is artificial, nature is in constant interconnection, like a huge and immense web. Position as a characteristic has no meaning in a world where nothing is divided. Three-dimensional space and time are only projections. Real reality is a hologram in which there is neither past nor future, everything exists in currently. If a special tool becomes available to a person, then he can, being in the present, see the events of the past.
More than one Bohm came to the conclusion that reality is a hologram, neuroscientist Karl Pribram, who works at Stanford University and is engaged in research human brain, tends to the theory of the holographic nature of the world. Pribram was led to such thoughts by thinking about human memories, there is no separate part in the brain that would be responsible for memories, they are dispersed throughout the brain.
Carl Lashley in the 20s of the last century proved experimentally that in a rat, when various parts of the brain are removed, all conditioned reflexes that developed before the operation. And no one could explain how memory resides in every part of the brain. Then, in the 60s of the last century, Pribram had to face the principle of holography, he explained what other neuroscientists have been trying to explain for so long. Pribram is sure that memory is not in neurons, but in nerve impulses that circulate throughout the brain, just as a piece of a hologram contains all the information about an image.
A lot of scientific facts they say that the brain is adapted for holographic functioning. Hugo Zucharelli, an Argentine-Italian researcher, recently discovered a holographic model in acoustics. He was worried about the fact that a person can determine where the sound comes from, even with one ear. Only the principle of holography can explain this. He developed a technology that holophonically recorded sound, which, when listened to, was remarkably real.
Pribram's theory that our brains create "hard" objects based on input frequencies has been confirmed. Scientists have determined that the human brain is able to perceive frequencies of a larger range. For example, it turned out that a person can “hear” with his eyes, all cells of our body perceive higher frequencies. Human consciousness transforms the chaotic perception of frequencies into a continuous one.
An amazing moment, if Pribram's holographic theory of the brain is combined with Bohm's theory, it turns out that a person perceives only a reflection of holographic frequencies that come from something inaccessible to understanding. The human brain is part of a hologram, it selects the frequencies it needs and transforms them. It turns out that objective reality does not exist.
Since ancient times, Eastern religions have said that matter is an illusion - Maya. Moving in the physical world is an illusion. Man, as a "receiver", existing in a kaleidoscope of frequencies, chooses one source from a huge variety and turns it into a physical reality. The ability to read another person's mind may be nothing more than the ability to perceive the holographic level.
what model of the world can explain some amazing phenomena, for example, in the 50s of the last century, LSD was used in psychotherapy. Once, Professor Grof had a woman at the reception, she was given a drug, after a while she began to claim that she was a female dinosaur. When the patient had hallucinations, she described in detail the perception of the world by another creature and mentioned the golden scales on the head of the male. Professor Grof asked zoologists and found out that the golden scales on the head of reptiles are needed for mating games. The patient did not know anything about this. Grof was constantly faced with the fact that his patients returned to the past along the steps of evolution. Later, based on his observations, the film "Altered States" was shot. In addition, all the details that the patients told were exactly the same as the biological descriptions of the species.
However, people at Grof's receptions not only turned into animals, but also demonstrated knowledge that they did not have before. Poorly educated or completely uneducated patients began to talk about Zoroastrian funerals or retell scenes from Hindu mythology. It turns out that somehow people could come into contact with the collective unconscious.
At other receptions, people experienced out-of-body experiences, predicted the future and talked about their past incarnations. Later, Professor Grof discovered that unusual states come to patients without the use of drugs. What all patients had in common was the expansion of consciousness and its going beyond the limits of time and space. Grof called the experiences of patients "transpersonal", then a separate branch appeared - transpersonal psychology. Grof has many followers today, but no one can explain the strange phenomena that occur in psychotherapy sessions.
From the point of view of the holographic theory, everything becomes clear. If consciousness is part of a continuum and connected to other consciousnesses that exist or have existed, then the transpersonal experience no longer seems strange. The idea of a world-hologram can also be found in biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Intermon College in Viginia, says you can't think of consciousness as a product of the brain. Rather, on the contrary, consciousness creates the brain, the body and the entire surrounding reality. Such a reversal of views can affect both medicine and the process of recovery of the body. What is now called a cure may be nothing more than correct adjustments to a person's hologram. Healing occurs by changing consciousness. Everyone knows that mental images can cure a person, the experience of the other world and revelations can also be explained by a holographic model of the world.
In his book Gifts of the Unknown, biologist Layal Watson describes an encounter with a female shaman from Indonesia. She performed a ritual dance, and the grove of trees disappeared before the eyes of onlookers. Trees disappeared and reappeared. Such phenomena modern science can't explain.
In the world-hologram there are no frames, no restrictions for changing reality. The bending of the spoon becomes possible, as well as the scenes that Carlos Castaneda described in his books. The world is nothing but a description of reality.
Whether the idea of a holographic world will develop or not is still unknown, but it has already become quite popular among scientists. If it is established that the holographic model of the world does not adequately explain the instantaneous interaction of elementary particles, then, as Basil Healey, a physicist at Bairback College, said, one should be prepared for the fact that reality may have to be understood differently.
Recently, physicists have presented calculations according to which spaces with a flat metric (including our universe) can be holograms. In their work, the authors used the idea of AdS / CFT - correspondence (Anti - de Sitter / Conformal Field Theory Correspondence) between conformal field theory and gravity. Using a particular example of such a correspondence, scientists have shown the equivalence of the description of these two theories.
. So what is a holographic universe and what does black holes, duality and string theory have to do with it?
This work is based on the so-called holographic principle, which states that for a mathematical description of any world, information is sufficient that is contained on its outer boundary: in this case, an idea of an object of higher dimension can be obtained from "Holograms" that have a lower dimension. The principle proposed in 1993 by the Dutch physicist Gerard "t Hooft as applied to string theory (also called M - theory or modern mathematical physics) was embodied in the idea of AdS / CFT - correspondence, which was pointed out in 1998 by the American physicist - theorist of Argentinean origin Juan Maldacena.
In this correspondence, the description of gravity in the five-dimensional anti-de sitter space - the space of negative curvature (that is, with Lobachevsky geometry) - using superstring theory turns out to be equivalent to some limit of the four-dimensional supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, defined on the four-dimensional boundary of five dimensions. In the non-supersymmetric case, the four-dimensional Yang-mills theory forms the basis of the standard model - the theory of observed interactions of elementary particles. The theory of superstrings, based on the assumption of the existence on the Planck scale of hypothetical one-dimensional objects - strings - describes five-dimensionality. The prefix "Super" in this case means the presence of symmetry, in which each elementary particle has its own superpartner with opposite quantum statistics.
The equivalence of the description means that between the observed theories there is an unambiguous connection - duality. Mathematically, this manifests itself in the presence of a relation that makes it possible to calculate the interaction parameters of particles (or strings) of one of the theories, if those are known for the other. At the same time, there is no other way to do this for the first theory. The idea of duality and the holographic principle are illustrated by two examples that demonstrate the convenience of such analogies in describing phenomena on a scale from elementary particles to the universe. Probably, such convenience has fundamental grounds and is one of the properties of nature.
According to the holographic principle, two universes of different dimensions can have an equivalent description. Physicists have shown this with the example of AdS/CFT between the five-dimensional anti-de-sitter space and its four-dimensional boundary. As a result, it turned out that the five-dimensional space is described as a four-dimensional hologram on its boundary. A black hole in this approach, existing in five dimensions, manifests itself in four dimensions in the form of radiation.
The first example is the duality of the description of black holes and the confinement of quarks ("non-ejection" of quarks - elementary particles participating in strong interactions - hadrons. Experiments on the scattering of other such particles by hadrons showed that they consist of two (mesons) or three (baryons - such as, for example, protons and neutrons) quarks, which, unlike other elementary particles, cannot be in a free state.
The work of physicists from India, Austria and Japan is based on the calculation of Rényi entropy for the correspondence between two-dimensional conformal field theory (describing elementary particles) and gravity in three-dimensional anti-de sitter space. Scientists, using the example of quantum entanglement (which manifests itself when the properties of objects initially connected to each other turn out to be correlated even when they are separated by a distance from each other), have shown that entropy takes the same values in flat quantum gravity and in two-dimensional field theory.
Such non-observability of the quark is visible in computer calculations, but has not yet been theoretically substantiated. The mathematical formulation of this problem is known as the "Mass Gap" problem in gauge theories, and it is one of the seven Millennium Problems formulated by the Clay Institute. To date, only one of the formulated problems (the Henri Poincaré hypothesis) has been solved - this was done more than ten years ago by the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman.
When moving away from each other, the interaction between quarks only intensifies, while when they approach each other, it weakens. This property, called asymptotic freedom, was predicted by American theoretical physicists and Nobel Prize winners Frank Wilczek, David Gross, and David Politzer. String theory offers a spectacular description of this phenomenon using the analogy between "not flying" particles out from under the event horizon of a black hole and trapping quarks in hadrons. However, such a description leads to unobservable effects and is therefore used only as an illustrative example.
Scientists from the Center for Astrophysical Research at the Fermi Laboratory (Fermilab) are now working on the creation of a device "holometer" (Holometer), with which they can disprove everything that mankind now knows about the universe. If the experiment being prepared for is successful, then the existing laws of physics may be rewritten!
With the help of the Holometer device, specialists hope prove or disprove the "crazy" assumption that the three-dimensional universe as we know it simply does not exist, being nothing more than a kind of hologram. In other words, the surrounding reality is an illusion and nothing more...
Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy, and this is not a metaphor. He believes that if we could somehow peer into the smallest cell of space-time, we would find that the universe is riddled with internal trembling, like the hiss of electrostatic interference in a short-wave radio receiver. This noise is not produced by constantly born and dying particles or some other quantum foam that physicists have argued about in the past. Hogan noise will manifest itself if the world is not smooth and continuous, like a matte screen on which fields and particles dance, as we have long believed. It arises if the world consists of separate blocks. Pieces. Grains of sand. The discovery of Hogan noise would mean the universe is digital...
The theory that the universe is a hologram is based on the recent assumption that space and time in the universe are not continuous, but consist of separate parts, dots - as if from pixels, because of which it is impossible to increase the "image scale" of the Universe indefinitely, penetrating deeper and deeper into the essence of things. Upon reaching some value of the scale, the Universe turns out to be something like a digital image of very poor quality - fuzzy, blurry. Imagine a typical magazine photo. It looks like a continuous image, but, starting from a certain level of magnification, it breaks up into dots that make up a single whole. And also our world, perhaps, is assembled from microscopic points into a single beautiful, even convex picture.
Amazing theory! And until recently, it was treated lightly. Only recent studies of black holes have convinced most researchers that there is something in the "holographic" theory. The fact is that the gradual evaporation of black holes discovered by astronomers with the passage of time led to an information paradox - all the information contained about the insides of the hole would then disappear. And this is contrary to the principle of preservation of information. But the laureate Nobel Prize in physics, Gerard t "Hooft, relying on the works of Jerusalem University professor Jacob Bekenstein, proved that all information contained in a three-dimensional object can be stored within the two-dimensional boundaries that remain after its destruction - just like the image of a three-dimensional object can be placed in two-dimensional hologram.
For the first time, the “crazy” idea of universal illusoryness was born by the University of London physicist David Bohm, an associate of Albert Einstein, in the middle of the 20th century. According to his theory, the whole world is arranged in much the same way as a hologram. Just as any arbitrarily small section of a hologram contains the entire image of a three-dimensional object, so every existing object is “embedded” in each of its constituent parts.
“It follows from this that there is no objective reality,” said Professor Bohm, then with a startling conclusion. “Even in spite of its apparent density, the universe is at its core a phantasm, a gigantic, luxuriously detailed hologram.
Recall that a hologram is a three-dimensional photograph taken with a laser. To make it, first of all, the object to be photographed must be illuminated by laser light. Then the second laser beam, adding up with the reflected light from the object, gives an interference pattern (alternating minima and maxima of the rays), which can be recorded on the film. The finished shot looks like a meaningless interlayering of light and dark lines. But as soon as the image is illuminated with another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object immediately appears.
Three-dimensionality is not the only remarkable property inherent in a hologram. If a hologram with an image of, for example, a tree is cut in half and illuminated with a laser, each half will contain a whole image of the same tree in exactly the same size. If we continue to cut the hologram into smaller pieces, on each of them we will again find an image of the entire object as a whole. Unlike a conventional photograph, each area of the hologram contains information about the entire subject, but with a proportionally corresponding decrease in clarity.
“The principle of the hologram “everything in every part” allows us to approach the issue of organization and order in a completely new way,” explained Professor Bohm. For most of its history, Western science has developed with the idea that The best way to understand a physical phenomenon, be it a frog or an atom, is to cut it open and study its constituent parts. The hologram has shown us that some things in the universe cannot be explored in this way. If we dissect something arranged holographically, we will not get the parts of which it consists, but we will get the same thing, but with less accuracy.
Bohm's "crazy" idea was also prompted by a sensational experiment with elementary particles in its time. A physicist from the University of Paris, Alan Aspect, discovered in 1982 that, under certain conditions, electrons are able to instantly communicate with each other, regardless of the distance between them. It doesn't matter if there are ten millimeters between them or ten billion kilometers. Somehow each particle always knows what the other is doing. Only one problem of this discovery was embarrassing: it violates Einstein's postulate about the limiting speed of propagation of interaction equal to the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking through a time barrier, this frightening prospect has caused physicists to greatly doubt Aspect's work.
But Bohm managed to find an explanation. According to him, elementary particles interact at any distance not because they exchange some mysterious signals with each other, but because their separation is illusory. He explained that at some deeper level of reality, such particles are not separate entities, but are actually extensions of something more fundamental.
“For better understanding, the professor illustrated his intricate theory with the following example,” wrote Michael Talbot, author of The Holographic Universe. Imagine an aquarium with fish. Imagine also that you cannot see the aquarium directly, but only two television screens that transmit images from cameras located one in front and one on the side of the aquarium. Looking at the screens, you can conclude that the fish on each of the screens are separate objects. Since the cameras transmit images from different angles, the fish look different. But as you continue watching, after a while you will find that there is a relationship between the two fish on different screens. When one fish turns, the other also changes direction, slightly different, but always in line with the first. When you see one fish in full face, the other is certainly in profile. If you do not have a complete picture of the situation, you are more likely to conclude that the fish must somehow instantly communicate with each other, that this is not a fact of a coincidence.
“The apparent superluminal interaction between particles tells us that there is a deeper level of reality hidden from us,” Bohm explained the phenomenon of Aspect experiments, “of a higher dimension than ours, as in the analogy with an aquarium. We see these particles as separate only because we see only a part of reality. And particles are not separate “parts,” but facets of a deeper unity that is ultimately as holographic and invisible as the tree mentioned above. And since everything in physical reality consists of these "phantoms", the Universe we observe is itself a projection, a hologram.
What else a hologram can carry is not yet known. Suppose, for example, that it is a matrix that gives rise to everything in the world, at least it contains all the elementary particles that have taken or will someday take on any possible form of matter and energy - from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It's like a universal supermarket, which has everything.
While Bohm admitted that we have no way of knowing what else the hologram holds, he took the liberty of asserting that we have no reason to assume that there is nothing else in it. In other words, perhaps the holographic level of the world is just one of the stages of endless evolution.
But is it possible to “feel” this illusory nature with instruments? It turned out yes. For several years now, research has been carried out in Germany at the GEO600 gravitational telescope built in Hannover (Germany) to detect gravitational waves, space-time fluctuations that create supermassive space objects. Not a single wave over the years, however, could not be found. One of the reasons is strange noises in the range from 300 to 1500 Hz, which the detector fixes for a long time. They interfere with his work. Researchers searched in vain for the source of the noise until Craig Hogan, director of the Center for Astrophysical Research at the Fermi Laboratory, accidentally contacted them. He said he understood what was going on. According to him, it follows from the holographic principle that space-time is not a continuous line and, most likely, is a collection of microzones, grains, a kind of space-time quanta.
“And the accuracy of the GEO600 equipment today is sufficient to fix vacuum fluctuations occurring at the boundaries of space quanta, the very grains that, if the holographic principle is correct, the Universe consists of,” Professor Hogan explained.
According to him, GEO600 just stumbled upon the fundamental limitation of space-time - the same “grain”, like the graininess of a magazine photo. And perceived this obstacle as "noise".
And Craig Hogan, following Bohm, confidently repeats: if the results of the GEO600 meet my expectations, then we all really live in a huge hologram of universal proportions.
The detector readings so far correspond exactly to his calculations, and it seems that the scientific world is on the verge of a grand discovery. Experts recall that once extraneous noise that pissed off researchers at Bell Laboratory - a large research center in the field of telecommunications, electronic and computer systems - during the experiments of 1964, has already become a harbinger of a global change in the scientific paradigm: this is how the cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered, which proved the hypothesis about the Big Bang.
And scientists are waiting for evidence of the holographic nature of the Universe when the device "Holometer" will work at full capacity. Scientists hope that it will increase the amount of practical data and knowledge of this extraordinary discovery, which still belongs to the field of theoretical physics. The detector is designed as follows: they shine with a laser through a beam splitter, from there two beams pass through two perpendicular bodies, are reflected, returned back, merge together and create an interference pattern, where any distortion indicates a change in the ratio of the lengths of the bodies, since gravity wave passes through bodies and compresses or stretches space unequally in different directions.
“The Holometer will allow us to zoom in on space-time and see if assumptions about the fractional structure of the universe, based on purely mathematical deductions, are confirmed,” suggests Professor Hogan.
Additionally:
Holograms are perhaps among the most interesting "flat" objects that humans can create. Being a completely three-dimensional set of information encoded on a two-dimensional surface, holograms can change their appearance depending on your point of view. And although scientists claim that we can only perceive three spatial dimensions, there can actually be many more. Hence, it raises the intriguing possibility that we may be a holographic projection of a multi-dimensional universe, in some sense.
Holographic could explain a lot. So, assuming the holographic point of view is correct, what would be the relationship between the 2D surface and the 3D manifestation? How useful is a hologram in understanding the universe?
We've all seen holograms, but most people don't know how they actually work. Their scientific side is quite fascinating. With photography, it's simple: you take the light emitted or reflected from an object, focus it in a lens, and record it onto a flat surface. It's not just photography that works this way: your eye works similarly. The lens in your eyeball focuses the light, and the rods and cones at the back of your eye record it, sending signals to your brain, which converts them into a picture.
However, using a special emulsion and coherent (that is, laser) light, you can create a map of the entire light field of an object, that is, a hologram. Variations in density, textures, transparency, and more can be accurately recorded. When properly lit, this flat 2D map displays a full set of 3D information that changes depending on your perspective and, best of all, does so for every possible perspective you can look at it from. Print it on a metal film and you will get a regular traditional hologram.
Our universe, as we perceive it, has three spatial dimensions available to us. But what if there are many more? Just as an ordinary hologram is a two-dimensional surface that encodes a complete set of information about our three-dimensional universe, can our three-dimensional universe encode information about the fundamentally four-or-more-dimensional reality in which we are imprisoned? In principle, this is possible, and a number of amusing possibilities follow from this. True, these possibilities also have their limitations, which are important to understand.
The idea that our universe could be a hologram came out of the concept of string theory. String theory emerged from the assumption - the string model - that could explain the strong interactions, that protons, neutrons, and other baryons (and mesons) have a composite structure. She made a bunch of nonsensical predictions that didn't fit with experiments, including the existence of a particle with spin 2. But people realized that if the energy scale was shifted up toward Planck, the string model could unify known fundamental forces with gravity. Thus, string theory was born. Plus or minus (depending on which side to look) of this model is that it requires more measurements. A serious question then became how to extract our Universe with three spatial dimensions from a theory in which there are many more of these dimensions. And which of the string theories (and there are many) will be the most correct?
Perhaps many various models and scenarios of string theory are just different aspects of the same fundamental theory, considered from different angles. In mathematics, two systems that are equivalent to each other are known as "dual" (dual), and one unexpected discovery pointed towards the hologram - in the dual system, each side has different number measurements. In 1997, physicist Juan Maldacena suggested that our three-dimensional universe (plus time), with its quantum field theories describing elementary particles and interactions, is dual to a higher-dimensional space-time (anti-de Sitter space), which has implications for quantum theories gravity.
So far, the only dualities we've found relate the properties of a multidimensional space to its lower one-dimensional boundary: reduce the dimensions by one. It is not yet clear whether we can deduce from ten-dimensional string theory a three-dimensional universe like ours so that they are dual. We can create two-dimensional holograms by encoding only three-dimensional information; we cannot encode 4D information in a 3D hologram; we cannot encode our three-dimensional universe into a one-dimensional one.
Another interesting reason why two spaces with different dimensions are dual is that less information is available on the surface of a low-dimensional boundary than inside the volume of the full space that this boundary contains. So if you measure something that happens on the surface, you can find out something about what happens inside the volume. What's happening in multidimensional space may be related to what is happening elsewhere rather than happening independently. It may sound “unrealistic,” but remember quantum entanglement and how measuring a property of one member of an entangled system instantly tells you information about another. Perhaps holography is related to this quirk of nature.
It is (or once was) a giant and very complex hologram in which all physical laws require only two dimensions, but at the same time everything around us operates according to three dimensions. As you can imagine, such a hypothesis is not at all easy to prove, but physicists report that they have finally found the first observable evidence that the early Universe could ideally correspond to the so-called holographic principle and this does not contradict the standard model at all big bang.
“We propose to use this holographic model of the Universe, which is very different from the most popular standard model of the Big Bang, based on gravity and inflation,” says one of the study participants Nyayesh Afshordi from the Canadian University of Waterloo.
“Each of these models allows us to make various predictions that we can test, and on the basis of this refine and complement our theoretical understanding of the universe. Moreover, it will be possible to do this within the next five years.”
To be clear, scientists are not saying that right now we are all living in a hologram. They only tolerate the assumption that at its early stage - within a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang - everything in the universe began to be a three-dimensional projection, originally created from two-dimensional boundaries.
If you are not familiar with the theoretical epic “Our Universe is a hologram” at all, then here is a short digression into history for you. The theory that our entire universe is a hologram dates back to the 1990s, when the American theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind began to promote to the masses his idea that the laws of physics known to us do not actually require the presence of three dimensions.
So how is it that the universe around us is three-dimensional, but "in reality" it is represented as two-dimensional? The basis of the idea lies in the fact that the volume of its space is “encoded” within certain boundaries, or in the so-called field of the gravitational horizon, whose boundaries depend on the point of observation. Before you start laughing, consider that over 10,000 papers have been written since 1997 supporting this idea. In other words, she is not as crazy as she might seem at first glance. Well, if only a little.
Now, Afshordi and his team have reported that, as part of their study of the uneven distribution of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the residual radiation of the Big Bang), they have found strong evidence supporting the explanation of the holographic shape of the Universe at its earliest stages of development.
“Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and taking into account your perception of time) actually comes from a two-dimensional flat field,” says Kostas Skenderis of the University of Southampton and one of the study participants.
“The principle is similar to what we can see in conventional holograms, where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional plane. This, for example, is characteristic of holograms on the same credit cards. However, in our case, we are already talking about the fact that the entire Universe is encoded in this way.
The reason why physicists are generally interested in the holographic principle, while the standard model of the Big Bang looks much clearer and more logical, is that there are some gaps in the latter, but these gaps are so fundamental that they slow down the process of our understanding of all physical laws. as a whole and still in its infancy.
According to the Big Bang scenario, chemical reactions led to a very large-scale expansion of the original space, which led to the formation of our universe. And at an early stage of its birth, the speed of this expansion (inflation) was colossal. While most physicists support the theory of cosmic inflation, no one has yet been able to figure out the exact mechanism responsible for this dramatic expansion of the universe at a speed faster than the speed of light and growth from the subatomic level to the present. Everything happened almost instantly.
The trouble is that none of our current theories can explain how it all works together. Take, for example, general theory relativity, which perfectly explains the behavior of large objects, but is not able to explain the behavior of the smallest ones. This is already the environment of quantum mechanics, which, in turn, is not capable of explaining many other things. All this saddens even more when it is necessary to explain how literally all the mass and energy existing in the Universe was originally concentrated in a tiny space. One hypothesis tries to combine both phenomena at once, the other, about quantum gravity, says that if you can discard one spatial dimension, then you can also discard gravity in your calculations to simplify the calculation problem.
Holographic principle
“It's all hologram. In the sense that there is a description of the Universe that says that the probability of even a reduced number of dimensions corresponds to everything that we can see after the Big Bang,” says Afshordi.
To test how well the holographic principle of the universe copes with explaining everything that happened at the very moment of the Big Bang and after this event, a team of scientists created a computer model with one time and two spatial dimensions.
When the researchers fed the known data about the universe into this model, including observations of the CMB—thermal radiation that emerged only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang—they found no contradictions. Everything fit perfectly. Including relic radiation. The model actually perfectly recreated the behavior of thin segments of the CMB, but could not recreate larger "slices" of the Universe with a width of more than 10 degrees. This would require a more complex model.
Scientists explain that they are very far from proving that our universe was actually once a holographic projection. However, we now have the fact of obtaining empirical data collected on the basis of real knowledge about the Universe. This fact may eventually be the beginning of the discovery of a possibility that will allow us to explain the missing parts in physical laws in terms of a two-dimensional representation. In other words, the work of Afshordi and his colleagues only proves that it is an unforgivable luxury to rashly reject the probability of a holographic model of the Universe.
Does this mean that we are all now living in a complex hologram? According to Afshordi, this is not entirely true. Their model is able to describe what happened only in the earliest era of the universe, but not its current state. Nevertheless, now it is worth considering how things from two-dimensional space can be projected into three-dimensional space, if, of course, we are talking about the universe, and not about credit cards.
“I would say that we do not live in a hologram. But we should not discard the possibility that we could get out of it. Nevertheless, in 2017 you definitely live in three dimensions,” Afshordi summed up.
