Science News Review

Reality Might Be a Hologram

Feb 5 at 4:04pm by Aileen

Researchers at Cardiff University have managed to confirm a prediction made before the British-German gravity wave detector GEO600 was up and running, and it just might open up a whole new era in fundamental physics.

The press release Cardiff researchers could herald a new era explains that the GEO600 detector has been receiving some mysterious ‘noise’ that might confirm that the true nature of the universe is holographic, as predicted by physicist Craig Hogan at Fermilab. The GEO600 team is now gearing toward further experiments that may lend further evidence in favor of this theory. New Scientist has a more in-depth article, Our world may be a giant hologram that fleshes out the concepts.

Physicists have long hypothesized that the universe is ‘grainy’ at the Planck level, which is the smallest conceptual unit of space and time. Scientists cannot hope ever to measure phenomena at that level, but if the universe is a hologram projected from those tiny “grains of sand” they may well be able to detect levels of the projection as far into the high energy/small size range as they can ever go. That projection, Hogan maintains, is the source of the noise in the detector.

Holograms are created by a special photographic process where an object is bathed in the light of a laser, then a second laser is bounced off the reflected light of the first, and the interference pattern is captured on film. When that image (which looks like a meaningless swirl of light) is illuminated by yet another polarized light source, a 3-dimensional image of the original appears. It is basically the famous double-slit effect, making specific use of the interference pattern of the light. Apart from the 3-dimensional projection, holograms are remarkable in that no matter how you subdivide them, each piece contains all the information contained in the whole. The images just get smaller with each division. Every part contains the whole.

The GEO600 detector is designed to make use of measurements made with a split-beam of polarized light at right angles to detect the tiniest changes as gravity waves pass through the earth. Those changes would show up as interference patterns of the light, thus the experiment has something in common with the process of creating and projecting holograms. That the experiment is detecting ‘noise’ – interference patterns in the light that do not indicate gravity waves – is a confirmation of the holographic universe model, Hogan says.

The GEO600 team will now attempt to fine-tune the detector to higher and higher wavelengths to see if the noise disappears at a certain level. Hogan has proposed a new experiment using an atom interferometer. These work on the same principle as laser-based detectors but instead of light they use beams of ultracold atoms.

Discovery of unexpected noise by a Bell Labs antenna in 1964 confirmed the cosmic microwave background radiation, leading to general acceptance of the Big Bang theory. This new noise could lead to a historical re-vamping of our understanding of the universe as well, so keep an eye on the GEO600 experiments!

Links:

Cardiff researchers could herald a new era
Our world may be a giant hologram
Wikipedia: Holographic principle