Our world may be a giant hologram

[coyote]

Source: New Scientist

DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

Read more: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html

[Runcible Spoon]

1. I have an advanced degree and I think I need to drop acid to wrap my head around this

that's some seriously trippy interesting stuff!

[derby378]

2. More to the point...

Every fundamental particle such as an electron, a neutrino, or a photon may be a "hologram" of a much smaller subquantum "bit" of spacetime foam, 10 -35 m in length (the Planck length), that oscillates in a field millions of times larger than itself. It's kind of like watching a baseball bounce around at the speed of light in a volume of space the size of China. What you see is the blur of all that oscillation, but not the bit itself.

At least I think that's what these physicists are claiming...

[Runcible Spoon]

4. ......................

I'm sorry I have nothing intelligent to add to this thread. One of my biggest regrets is never taking any astrophysics in college...I think it's interesting so I'm bumpin' it again! :evilgrin:

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. Descartes beat this guy to it by a couple of hundred years

...

[jus_the_facts]

5. ".....la la la la.....life is but a dream...."

:crazy:

[tanyev]

6. And all the men and women merely 3-D images

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. What is the Matrix? nt

[pleah]

9. Take the blue pill, take the blue pill!

:evilgrin:

[teknomanzer]

12. Too late...

I took the red pill a long time ago.

It seems like Oriental philosophy and metaphysics is being confirmed by Occidental scientific method. We are coming full circle.

Wake up Neo.

[MakesMoves]

8. well

pain, murder, death, corruption, injustice, GWB&DC, war, attrocities every damn day.....these are some pretty strong holograms off the big ol holodeck. not to discount the theory, but fundamentally is it not true that unless we have the ability to manipulate this hologram on a more basic degree than philosophy and human change variants like decision making does it all even matter? In essence if i start a war for no reason and people die for no reason hologram or not, whats the difference?

[teknomanzer]

13. It may sound absurd...

but there are some sages out there who basically said that it doesn't matter. Not one damn thing matters. Its all a fucking illusion. This is just one hell of a fucked up ride. It just so happens that the illusion is so damn convincing that we do lie, cheat, steal, and kill.

The horrific spectacle that life is, why have it at all? Because drama makes for great entertainment, and God, who is us, gets bored, wants to forget that God is God which gets boring after a while, so God sleeps and has this dream, this dream we call life. With pain, murder, death, corruption, injustice, GWB&DC, war, atrocities - but none of it really matter because its a dream.

"Well, Shit," you say, "what if everybody really believed that? Wouldn't everything just fall apart? After all what reason is there to fight, or go to work in the morning, or do anything at all?"

What would happen if everyone believed that? Maybe we would just wake up.

Now, you take the blue pill and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever it is you want to believe. You take the red pill and I'll show you how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

Shit, I think I hear the gate keepers coming...

[MakesMoves]

14. i think

theres a book along the lines of that God synopsis about him wanting to forget he's God. Its called "A Conversation With God" in particular I've read book 3 of 3 and its a really good book.

[Waiting For Everyman]

10. I'm no scientist but, that whole thing about the space between atoms

made me wonder about something like this being true, back in grade school when we were learning the basics of chemistry. Also, I had an unexplainable "future vision" years ago which made me wonder about how the nature of time fits into it too.

But to think that now we're actually approaching the edge of "this frontier"... wow.

[Juan_de_la_Dem]

11. So the world is flat after all?