Are We Holograms?
Most of the famous movies and novels that are dealing with remarkable and bold scientific ideas in existence, like plotting the script behind the most intriguing property in the latest string theory called the "holographic principle", lack one main attraction I am always looking for in science fiction. The plausibility of the story. To get to the wider audience, science behind is somehow always pushed below the main layer, and the result is either too philosophical, ridiculous, or unnecessary complex (like planting humans for energy in 'Matrix' by AIs) or simple love story, like in case of "The Thirteenth Floor", or other simple and proven Good-vs-Bad chases in virtual realities, like those portrayed in Caprica.
But, if I had to choose one of those Hollywood fictions, maybe you would be surprised if I preferred "The Thirteenth Floor" over all the others I had a chance to watch or read. For one simple reason. Like with the holographic principle in string theories, producers identified one very true prediction in such realities and embedded it in the film and its poster ad as well—the boundary that represents the very end of the world. In the movie, both virtual characters learn about their worlds not being the real deal by discovering their own artificial horizons where all the roads inevitably and ultimately end. Almost like in the Middle Ages when the Earth was considered to be flat and there was a point where it eventually ended or in the myth with Earth carried by four elephants standing on a turtle floating in a never-ending ocean. Like many times before, the science fiction behind this might not be too far from the truth at all, and if you think that centuries after the flat Earth myth, we finally learned that Earth is spherical and doesn't have an end along with our endless and ever-expanding universe, well, think again. With new findings and several published papers within ongoing string theory research, especially within holographic principle research of black hole event horizons, a new and exciting (or disturbing, looking at it from our own perspective) plausible reality might be considered the accurate one. And yes, with the new theory, our own universe now has an end in the form of one tiny two-dimensional bubble where we all might actually be located in our true form, and the universe, as we perceive it, is just a figment of our imagination or, to be precise, a hologram made out of some other reality residing in the outer bubble we simply know as the cosmological horizon.
Plausible?
Like with the end of the road in the movie, theoretical physicists hit the wall sometimes when they try to describe some astronomical processes. Exactly this was the case when Stephen Hawking discovered black hole radiation. Hawking radiation is made out of a pair of virtual particles emerging from a vacuum where the positive particle manages to escape the event horizon while the negative one gets absorbed by the black hole, resulting in the black hole losing energy and eventually evaporating. In other words, radiation from a black hole seems to not originate from the inside of the black hole at all. If this is true, then all the information of the matter swallowed by the black hole is lost forever, and that in fact contradicts quantum mechanics, which dictates that nothing, including information, can ever be lost. At the time, this problem, called the black hole information paradox, divided leading scientists to the point of a simple bet, where nobody was absolutely sure what was going on in the mysterious holes. There was even a book, published six years ago, conveniently named “The Black Hole War” by Leonard Susskind, committed to this paradox in physics.
Of course, paradoxes are only there to indicate that something is wrong, either with fundamentals or with the theories. In this case it's either something wrong with quantum mechanics and its math, and information can be lost in black holes, or this is impossible and some new (or one of the existing) theory is still waiting to be proven and accepted by mainstream science. You can find many of proposed solutions in below links, from the one where information still, by some unknown process, find the way to leak along with radiation of virtual particles through the one, that I preferred in the past, where black hole in the other end forms a baby universe with all the information transferred to the newly created cosmos to the most hypothetical one in which something happens at the very last moments of black hole evaporation, similar to the supernovae explosion with all the information finally burst out or ... in the more exotic realm ... and what is the newest approach and recently backed with new evidence, that all the information actually got copied in the tiny two-dimensional film of the event horizon and maybe never entered the black hole in the first place by some black hole quantum mechanism. If we use the life metaphor, the content of a black hole holds only corpses, while information, like a soul, left the body in the moment of death, or in this case, when it irretrievably fell into singularity. Actually, this approach is now widely accepted among string theorists, and it is appropriately named the "holographic principle", which all new string theories now include.
The scientific explanation for this principle is "the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region". String theory proposed by Juan Martín Maldacena, Gerard ’t Hooft, and Leonard Susskind with the holographic principle included suggests that not only with black holes but everywhere in the universe, all the information needed to describe a closed system or volume of space with any physical process inside can be fully encoded within the two-dimensional surface surrounding it. If this is correct, then we can go further and conclude that all the physical processes in the monitoring system are actually happening on the surface instead of in its three-dimensional representation, and our familiar space-time continuum might be just a (holographic) projection of the two-dimensional entities and events. On the larger scale, this theory allows that the entire universe can be understood as the reality of a two-dimensional information structure encoded within the cosmological horizon, while the three spatial dimensions we live in are only its representation at macroscopic scales and at low energies described by cosmological holography.
In other words, it might mean that there is a two-dimensional me (and you) at the end of the universe, more than 13 billion light-years away, encoded somewhere in the cosmological horizon, that is a full description of myself and controlling all my actions (and reactions) over here. Strangely enough, recently more evidence has been suggested in scientific research by Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his team. What they did was to perform a mathematical calculation of the internal energy of a black hole based on the predictions of string theory. By using the proposed holographic principle, they compared the results with the calculated internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity and found the amazing fact that they match completely. They, of course, used a model of a hypothetical universe, which is not a representation of our own, but still, this is the most valuable "proof" in favor of holographic theory. And not just that, if these calculations are right, this practically means that one complex universe with gravity included (that still fails to be understood fully) can be explained and compared by the flat universe with no gravity force whatsoever.
The holographic universe is, of course, highly hypothetical and hard to comprehend, but the main principle is solid; calculations are there, math exists, and it brings both a solution to the information paradox in black hole physics and a way to simplify our future modeling of astronomical systems. With a possibility to exclude gravity out of the equation, the holographic principle is already nicknamed the "21st-century Rosetta Stone" in the world of mathematics, and if proven accurate, we could be a bit closer to the final understanding of how nature really works. But, like any other new breakthrough discovery, it could open many more questions on the way, and the obvious one is if the main reality is in the information surface, how does it work? How does life fit in? Is it also located on the surface and projected like everything else, or perhaps living creatures are something else that works independently?
Images and article refs:
* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
** https://community.emc.com/people/ble/blog/2011/11/06/holographic-principle
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2013/12/do-black-holes-destroy-information/
Refs:
http://www.nature.com/news/simulations-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram-1.14328
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
http://rt.com/news/space-evidence-universe-hologram-195/
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jun/03-our-universe-may-be-a-giant-hologram
http://astroengine.com/2009/01/20/is-the-universe-a-holographic-projection/
http://www.universetoday.com/107172/why-our-universe-is-not-a-hologram/
http://physics.about.com/od/astronomy/f/hawkrad.htm
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity
The Thirteenth Floor*
But, if I had to choose one of those Hollywood fictions, maybe you would be surprised if I preferred "The Thirteenth Floor" over all the others I had a chance to watch or read. For one simple reason. Like with the holographic principle in string theories, producers identified one very true prediction in such realities and embedded it in the film and its poster ad as well—the boundary that represents the very end of the world. In the movie, both virtual characters learn about their worlds not being the real deal by discovering their own artificial horizons where all the roads inevitably and ultimately end. Almost like in the Middle Ages when the Earth was considered to be flat and there was a point where it eventually ended or in the myth with Earth carried by four elephants standing on a turtle floating in a never-ending ocean. Like many times before, the science fiction behind this might not be too far from the truth at all, and if you think that centuries after the flat Earth myth, we finally learned that Earth is spherical and doesn't have an end along with our endless and ever-expanding universe, well, think again. With new findings and several published papers within ongoing string theory research, especially within holographic principle research of black hole event horizons, a new and exciting (or disturbing, looking at it from our own perspective) plausible reality might be considered the accurate one. And yes, with the new theory, our own universe now has an end in the form of one tiny two-dimensional bubble where we all might actually be located in our true form, and the universe, as we perceive it, is just a figment of our imagination or, to be precise, a hologram made out of some other reality residing in the outer bubble we simply know as the cosmological horizon.
Plausible?
Like with the end of the road in the movie, theoretical physicists hit the wall sometimes when they try to describe some astronomical processes. Exactly this was the case when Stephen Hawking discovered black hole radiation. Hawking radiation is made out of a pair of virtual particles emerging from a vacuum where the positive particle manages to escape the event horizon while the negative one gets absorbed by the black hole, resulting in the black hole losing energy and eventually evaporating. In other words, radiation from a black hole seems to not originate from the inside of the black hole at all. If this is true, then all the information of the matter swallowed by the black hole is lost forever, and that in fact contradicts quantum mechanics, which dictates that nothing, including information, can ever be lost. At the time, this problem, called the black hole information paradox, divided leading scientists to the point of a simple bet, where nobody was absolutely sure what was going on in the mysterious holes. There was even a book, published six years ago, conveniently named “The Black Hole War” by Leonard Susskind, committed to this paradox in physics.
Holographic Principle to Multiverse Reality**
Of course, paradoxes are only there to indicate that something is wrong, either with fundamentals or with the theories. In this case it's either something wrong with quantum mechanics and its math, and information can be lost in black holes, or this is impossible and some new (or one of the existing) theory is still waiting to be proven and accepted by mainstream science. You can find many of proposed solutions in below links, from the one where information still, by some unknown process, find the way to leak along with radiation of virtual particles through the one, that I preferred in the past, where black hole in the other end forms a baby universe with all the information transferred to the newly created cosmos to the most hypothetical one in which something happens at the very last moments of black hole evaporation, similar to the supernovae explosion with all the information finally burst out or ... in the more exotic realm ... and what is the newest approach and recently backed with new evidence, that all the information actually got copied in the tiny two-dimensional film of the event horizon and maybe never entered the black hole in the first place by some black hole quantum mechanism. If we use the life metaphor, the content of a black hole holds only corpses, while information, like a soul, left the body in the moment of death, or in this case, when it irretrievably fell into singularity. Actually, this approach is now widely accepted among string theorists, and it is appropriately named the "holographic principle", which all new string theories now include.
The scientific explanation for this principle is "the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region". String theory proposed by Juan Martín Maldacena, Gerard ’t Hooft, and Leonard Susskind with the holographic principle included suggests that not only with black holes but everywhere in the universe, all the information needed to describe a closed system or volume of space with any physical process inside can be fully encoded within the two-dimensional surface surrounding it. If this is correct, then we can go further and conclude that all the physical processes in the monitoring system are actually happening on the surface instead of in its three-dimensional representation, and our familiar space-time continuum might be just a (holographic) projection of the two-dimensional entities and events. On the larger scale, this theory allows that the entire universe can be understood as the reality of a two-dimensional information structure encoded within the cosmological horizon, while the three spatial dimensions we live in are only its representation at macroscopic scales and at low energies described by cosmological holography.
In other words, it might mean that there is a two-dimensional me (and you) at the end of the universe, more than 13 billion light-years away, encoded somewhere in the cosmological horizon, that is a full description of myself and controlling all my actions (and reactions) over here. Strangely enough, recently more evidence has been suggested in scientific research by Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his team. What they did was to perform a mathematical calculation of the internal energy of a black hole based on the predictions of string theory. By using the proposed holographic principle, they compared the results with the calculated internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity and found the amazing fact that they match completely. They, of course, used a model of a hypothetical universe, which is not a representation of our own, but still, this is the most valuable "proof" in favor of holographic theory. And not just that, if these calculations are right, this practically means that one complex universe with gravity included (that still fails to be understood fully) can be explained and compared by the flat universe with no gravity force whatsoever.
The holographic universe is, of course, highly hypothetical and hard to comprehend, but the main principle is solid; calculations are there, math exists, and it brings both a solution to the information paradox in black hole physics and a way to simplify our future modeling of astronomical systems. With a possibility to exclude gravity out of the equation, the holographic principle is already nicknamed the "21st-century Rosetta Stone" in the world of mathematics, and if proven accurate, we could be a bit closer to the final understanding of how nature really works. But, like any other new breakthrough discovery, it could open many more questions on the way, and the obvious one is if the main reality is in the information surface, how does it work? How does life fit in? Is it also located on the surface and projected like everything else, or perhaps living creatures are something else that works independently?
Images and article refs:
* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
** https://community.emc.com/people/ble/blog/2011/11/06/holographic-principle
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2013/12/do-black-holes-destroy-information/
Refs:
http://www.nature.com/news/simulations-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram-1.14328
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
http://rt.com/news/space-evidence-universe-hologram-195/
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jun/03-our-universe-may-be-a-giant-hologram
http://astroengine.com/2009/01/20/is-the-universe-a-holographic-projection/
http://www.universetoday.com/107172/why-our-universe-is-not-a-hologram/
http://physics.about.com/od/astronomy/f/hawkrad.htm
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity
