Jan 15, 2009 09:14 AM
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It's not until you acknowledge the world's greatest physicists do you realize how fundamentally useless our role here is. You and I will not uncover the secrets of the Universe. Luckily, someone's working on it.
One branch of theoretical physics believes that the Universe is just a holographic version of 2D information. And scientists have observed such being true, the 2D horizon around a black hole encoding the data from its earlier 3D star stage. You've observed the idea yourself as well, as it's not so different from a 3D movie playing from a DVD, or even music playing from data on a CD, really.
From New Scientist:
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 [ed: uber tiny] 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," says Hogan.
We won't rewrite New Scientist's entire brilliant piece, but needless to say, that Hogan guy in the quote above not only thinks that a new experiment may have found that noise in our holographic signal—he predicted the experiment's results before they happened. Hit the link to blow your pea brain for the day. Then ask yourself if we're all just bits of information on God's hard drive. [New Scientist and image]
Send an email to Mark Wilson, the author of this post, at mark@gizmodo.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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