Fermilab Experiment Finds No Evidence That We Live in a Hologram

http://gizmodo.com/fermilab-experiment-finds-no-evidence-that-we-live-in-a-1746130140

A controversial experiment at Fermilab designed to hunt for signs that our universe may really be a hologram has failed to find the evidence it was seeking, the laboratory has announced.

It’s called the Holometer (short for “Holographic Interferometer”), and it’s the brainchild of Fermilab physicist Craig Hogan. He dreamed up the idea in 2009 as a way to test the so-called holographic principle.

Back in the 1970s, a physicist named Jacob Bekenstein showed that the information about a black hole’s interior is encoded on its two-dimensional surface area (the “boundary”) rather than within its three-dimensional volume (the “bulk”). Twenty years later, Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft extended this notion to the entire universe, likening it to a hologram: our three-dimensional universe in all its glory emerges from a two-dimensional “source code.” New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye has likened the holographic concept to a can of soup. All the “stuff” of the universe, including human beings, makes up the “soup” inside the can, but all the information describing that stuff is inscribed on the label on the outside boundary.

Susskind initially considered it to be a metaphor, but then crunched some more numbers and concluded that the notion made literal sense as well: the 3D universe really is a projection of 2D information at the boundary.

The holographic principle has since become one of the most influential ideas in theoretical physics, yet many believe it to be untestable, at least for now. (It would require probing black holes up-close, a daunting prospect even if we had the technology to do so.) Hogan decided to try anyway. The Holometer looks for a special kind of holographic noise — a kind of quantum jitter in space-time — using a fairly humble-looking set-up: an array of lasers and mirrors in a dank underground tunnel, with the control room housed in a trailer. Nobody ever said physics was glamorous.

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I'm still waiting for them to prove it's not turtles all the way down.