Our holographic universe

This month's New Scientist features a cover article about the theoretic possibility that our universe may be a giant hologram. This revelation isn't anything new, but there now appears to be potential evidence in favor of the suggestion.

For a number of months, team-members working on the GEO600, a device that measures gravity waves, were confused about some inexplicable noise that was plaguing the giant detector. Researcher Craig Hogan offered an explanation: the 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.

"If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is," says Hogan, "then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram." The New Scientist article explains:

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

Confirming the holographic principle would be a big help to researchers trying to unite quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity. Hogan contends that if the holographic principle is confirmed, it rules out all approaches to quantum gravity that do not incorporate the holographic principle. Conversely, it would be a boost for those that do, like those derived from string theory and matrix theory. "Ultimately," says Hogan, "we may have our first indication of how space-time emerges out of quantum theory."

My favorite quote from the article comes from Hogan: "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time."

Mmmmm, microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time.

Okay, so you're a hologram. Carry on.

Photo Credit: Kenn Brown of Mondolithic Studios.

The rise of 'biocentrism'

There's a provocative article over at Astroroach: "A Biocentric and Holographic Universe." The general idea behind biocentrism is that our cosmology and metaphysics cannot ignore the important interplay between conscious observers and quantum effects. As Robert Lanza notes,

"The trees and snow evaporate when we’re sleeping. The kitchen disappears when we’re in the bathroom. When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting—the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness—or into waves of probability. The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way around as we have been taught. For each life there is a universe, its own universe. We generate spheres of reality, individual bubbles of existence."

This fits in very nicely with not just the revealing sciences, but with the foundations of consciousness-centric Buddhist metaphysics as well.