The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is about to start an unique experiment called the Holometer from which they hope to determine if we really live in a 2-D universe faking 3 dimensions or if the universe really is 3 -D.
Much like characters on a television show would not know that their seemingly 3 – D world exists only on a 2 – D screen, we could be clueless that our 3 – D space is just an illusion. The information about everything in our universe could actually be encoded in tiny packets in two dimensions.
Get close enough to your TV screen and you’ll see pixels, small points of data that make a seamless image if you stand back. Scientists think that the universe’s information may be contained in the same way, and that the natural “pixel size” of space is roughly 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom, a distance that physicists refer to as the Planck scale.
“We want to find out whether spacetime is a quantum system just like matter is,” said Craig Hogan, director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics and the developer of the holographic noise theory. “If we see something, it will completely change ideas about space we’ve used for thousands of years.”
Quantum theory suggests that it is impossible to know both the exact location and the exact speed of subatomic particles. If space comes in 2-D bits with limited information about the precise location of objects, then space itself would fall under the same theory of uncertainty . The same way that matter continues to jiggle (as quantum waves) even when cooled to absolute zero, this digitized space should have built-in vibrations even in its lowest energy state.
That’s an interesting take on things. And how does time fit in the whole picture? Heck, there are those that say that that the whole thing is wrong and that mass nor dimensions are real, but by products of nteraction of particles. Does this invalidate the chance for green chicks with hyper sex drives like the “Star Trek” ones? Better yet: can flat chested ladies now claim they are not since it is all an illusion? Inquiring minds want to know.
Now if they could only come up with an experiment that explains why liberals live in la-la land and refuse to let reality intrude on their fantasies of what thing should be like. That would rock the universe as we know it.