The universe might be a hologram
For a while now number crunching physicists have been working on a theory that everything around us is just a hologram.
Now, in two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues provide compelling evidence that the theory might be true.
In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena came up with a model of the universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings and could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. As you do.
He thought that a mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram. Anything that was really happening took place in a flatter cosmos where there was no gravity and was projected onto this space where we see it all as being reality. It solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. The problem is that it is difficult to prove.
Hyakutake looked at the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon, its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence.
In the other, he and a mate worked out the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.
Maldacena said that the numbers were right and an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory.
Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes said that they have numerically confirmed that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe.
Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory.
The way we see it, it explains why two-dimensional structures such as Apple, reality television and PR people have such an impact in 3D space which is out of proportion to their mass. If three dimensional space is controlled by 2D space then it means that all of them have more authority than anything with depth.