Cognitive Labs

See, you are a hologram, body and all

As you're reading this you exist in 2D, like a crystalline character in one register of a comic book. Simultaneously the body called you is being projected halfway across the universe into its present position, relative to the sun, the nearby arm of the spiral Milky Way galaxy, and the Local Group of galaxies (let's say the spine and cover of this month's issue of said comic book).

What? This is all possible if you subscribe to one physicist's new theory.

Craig Hogan, a scientist at the high-energy particle physics' Fermilab | official site in Batavia, Illinois thinks he might have stumbledupon the limit of space time through his participation in the GEO 600 experiment designed to measure subtle gravitational waves, ripples in space-time and remnants of cataclysmic cosmic events tied to black holes and neutron stars. While the GEO600, an array of underground detectors in Germany that extends for some 600 meters, has not detected signs of gravitational waves, it's regular staff had been puzzled by the detection of a subtle, ambient background noise.


representation of spacetime curvature

No one had an explanation.

Into the void stepped Hogan, who has hypothesized that where the 'smooth' continuum of space-time ends a granular pixellation of space-time begins, representing microscopic quantum scale irruptions in the fabric of space and time itself. These convulsions theoretically are the source of the detectable emissions.

"If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram," Hogan shockingly declared.

The conception that humans (and everything in our world) are inside a hologram that's "out there [youtube]" probably sounds impossible, however, the possibility can be derived from our present understanding of black holes, which is something with a pretty firm theoretical footing.

Taking it further, the implication is that 'reality' is actually a projection originating in a 2D substrate on the edge of the universe - that is a flat dimension, not unlike what is known about holograms etched onto the surface of credit cards and smart cards. In the 1990's Susskind and Hooft (a Nobel prize winner in Physics) pioneered the concept. (Palo Alto-based Susskind, a one-time apprentice plumber, also was the first physicist to prepare an entire course on quantum mechanics for distribution via iTunes) One of the key constructs is the earlier work of researchers which has shown theoretically that the entropy (that is, the winding down of energy from a present state to absolute nonexistence) of a black hole is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. Got that?

(The event horizon (Nasa) is the point of 'no escape' for light or other matter from the maw of the hole).


Pic from the film Event Horizon (c) Paramount Pictures

What Hogan is attempting to do is define the point of demarcation or smoothing between Einstein's cosmology and slightly more esoteric visions such as string theory, which has both advocates (like Michio Kaku here's his myspace page) and detractors.

It may in the future be possible to test the theory by measuring the degree of 'blurriness' seen in the universe at or above the scale of the Planck length, or 10^-35 meters.

Here's the notation, if you care to see:



For more background, read the whole article in New Scientist. The notation is not in the New Scientist, but is here thanks to Mr. Wales.



We need to find and ask the guy who was the product director of The Matrix about these features and see if we can do a usability study or focus group. (By the way, he's an acquaintance and colleague-John Billington, and a Facebook friend)

"So, how do you feel about being 2-dimensional? What if we made you a little taller, more colorful, more robust in the 3-D world? We can do all these things simply by tweaking our projector a little bit. Easy."

Labels: comic, entropy, eventhorizon, hogan, matrix, trinity