WeAreTheKey

Good New Scientist article on some really interesting findings into the holographic theory of the universe
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true

"DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."'
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The article continues on and is worth reading if this stuff interests you.

Thanks, {KO}! Very interesting article.

Seems like pretty mind-blowing stuff. Although, like any lay person outside a specific discipline, it's hard to know if my personal interpretation (and the reporter's interpretation) are truly in line with the concepts that the actual scientists/physicists are speaking of. It's pretty incredible to say that a "GEO600 gravitational wave detector" is detecting "noise" that a scientist, not even in the field that the GEO600 is set up for, claims could mean that the entire universe is a hologram because....black holes....space time....event horizon ....Planck length 10^-35....

....so I'm just not sure if the concepts that form in my mind, with virtually no knowledge of the discipline, are even close to what these scientists theorize that the sound out of the GEO600 actually could mean. Literally everything is a hologram? I have to admit that I don't quite "get" that one.

Yeah, this was a totally fascinating article. I love all this kind of stuff, and I'm currently reading a book called The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind who is mentioned in the article. It's awesome. When I read The Holographic Universe, it was completely fascinating, but I've since forgotten a lot of the ideas from that book.
It's really cool to see that real progress may be being made towards discovering the next level of understanding some of the most mindblowing qualities of the nature of our reality.
Quantum mechanics is mind-shattering as it is, so to combine it with an essentially holographic description of the universe is just awesome.
As far as the "hologram" thing goes, it is difficult to tell just how literally the analogy may be taken. There are obviously real differences between what we think of as a hologram and the universe, but I think perhaps some of the qualities we're discovering most closely resemble the description of how a hologram works.
For every bit of matter in the universe to be somehow 'represented' or 'reflected' in a 2-dimensional sense on the outer surface of the universe is an almost unimaginable concept. It essentially means that everything taking place in the universe could be 'seen' or 'read' by simply decoding the outer surface of the universe, which would make the whole 'omniscience' thing just a tad easier I suppose, for any God, that is...if he so desired to witness the universe in the same way that Neo could see reality by reading the code of the matrix instead of looking at matter directly....
Hmmm, I love it.

WOW! Here's an awesome essay on the subject of our universe being a hologram which goes into detail about how it may work, and the many implications of a reality which is actually a consciousness-based illusion. It's in plain English, well written, and worth the read! Dig it.

http://twm.co.nz/hologram.html

SO.. if it is a hologram, are we a hologram? or are we just living in time and creating the information that will be left as a hologram? and is Light the mode of transport for this information? When a neuron fires in our mind.. is there a visible light? or is it just a current? of invisble energy?
Can a hologram be tangible?
Having all the energy of all that is and ever was be tappable, would that a) explain reincarnation theories? b) mean that minds really can be read? omg. so many ideas thoughts questions.. so if we zoom way, way way way OUT are we-our universe, and everything past it just a single cell on the skin of a larger being? or a single firing of some being's thought on another dimension? woah.. I need a break...

Haha, thses are the kinds of questions you need to be asking!

"SO.. if it is a hologram, are we a hologram?"

Yes. We are part of the universe and made of matter and energy, therefore we are also encoded 'holographically' in the underlying nature of the universe.

"or are we just living in time and creating the information that will be left as a hologram?"

Mmm, nope. See above!

"and is Light the mode of transport for this information?"

In actuality, there IS no 'transport' of the information, it is all existing simulatneously everywhere, at the same time, and 'distance' is just an illusion that certain qualities of the hologram cause us to 'perceive'. Just remember back to the particles communicating across space and time. And remember that no matter how 'far apart' they are....they're actually in the same place. Crazy, I know. But quite possibly true!

"When a neuron fires in our mind.. is there a visible light? or is it just a current? of invisble energy?"

No, there is no visible light inside the brain, it's actually pitch black in there! Which is actually mindblowing to realize that all the bright colors and scenarios and vivid events we witness are not just being "let in" through the "window" of our eyes to shine upon our brain... it's ALL being translated into electrical signals, transported to the BACK of the brain, and then reassembled into a coherent scene which we perceive to be "bright, vivid & colorful" inside a PITCH-BLACK SPACE.

It's almost hard to grasp how incredible that really is. The light you think you're seeing right now is actually a recreation put together by your brain in total darkness which is causing you to believably perceive a bright vivid world which is 'out there' and your brain will never actually directly see.

Isn't it wild to know that there's no "lag" when you move your finger for example, while the light reflecting off your finger is encoded electrically by your retina, sent to your visual cortex, UNcoded, then detected by your consciousness as 'movement'?!?

Whoa....

I'll have to leave your other questions for later.