The Universe could be a Gigantic Hologram

[Silent_One]

Some interesting concepts are discussed in the Scientific American about the ultimate storage capacity of information on a computer chip and our perceptions of the world around us.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?colID=1&articleID=000AF072-4891-1F0A-97AE80A84189EEDF

The information storage capacity of devices such as hard disk drives has been increasing by leaps and bounds. When will such progress halt? What is the ultimate information capacity of a device that weighs, say, less than a gram and can fit inside a cubic centimeter (roughly the size of a computer chip)? How much information does it take to describe a whole universe? Could that description fit in a computer's memory?......

A silicon microchip carrying a gigabyte of data, for instance, has a Shannon entropy of about 1010 bits (one byte is eight bits), tremendously smaller than the chip's thermodynamic entropy, which is about 1023 bits at room temperature. This discrepancy occurs because the entropies are computed for different degrees of freedom. A degree of freedom is any quantity that can vary, such as a coordinate specifying a particle's location or one component of its velocity. The Shannon entropy of the chip cares only about the overall state of each tiny transistor etched in the silicon crystal--the transistor is on or off; it is a 0 or a 1--a single binary degree of freedom. Thermodynamic entropy, in contrast, depends on the states of all the billions of atoms (and their roaming electrons) that make up each transistor. As miniaturization brings closer the day when each atom will store one bit of information for us, the useful Shannon entropy of the state-of-the-art microchip will edge closer in magnitude to its material's thermodynamic entropy. When the two entropies are calculated for the same degrees of freedom, they are equal.

By studying the mysterious properties of black holes, physicists have deduced absolute limits on how much information a region of space or a quantity of matter and energy can hold. Related results suggest that our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial dimensions, might instead be "written" on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram. Our everyday perceptions of the world as three-dimensional would then be either a profound illusion or merely one of two alternative ways of viewing reality. A grain of sand may not encompass our world, but a flat screen might.

 

[diarrhea_splatter]

Be careful Silent One, people around here don't like others who think outside the box. Even if it's just an article. Good luck my friend, good luck.

 

[Vince]

How can you even say that? Most of the people you're talking about have already seen this as the idea isn't that new.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Oh please, I still believe that we aren't even alive.

I believe we are being controlled by machines. We are feul. We live in the... MATRIX.

J/K

On a serious note:

Anything is possible.

 

[DeathKnight]

Anyone read the article on parallel universes? (I happened to check it out in the actual issue it was in a while ago)

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000F1EDD-B48A-1E90-8EA5809EC5880000

Quite an interesting read

 

[Deepak]

Good find, DeathKnight.....I think it would the event of the universe if we could solve these mystries....I am thrilled/

 

[Tagrineth]

Man... if only I didn't run out of sig space and give up on the New Lows! thing.

Edit: I still prefer Earthworm Jim's theory: The Universe is contained within a giant snow globe ^_^

 

[Fred]

This isn't a joke btw, this is a very current, highly promising avenue in Quantum Gravity. In String Theory its known as the AdS/CFT conjecture/sector. Loop Quantum Gravity seems to be also highly combatible with this idea.

IMO if one thing turns out true in the whole mess that is theoretical physics these days, its this holographic principle in one of its many forms.

 

[DemoCoder]

This theory just seems to be a reinterpretation of several well known results (like the beckenstein bound), i.e. that it is possible to "compress" the information content of universe down to a much smaller representation, e.g. entropy is proportional to area (2D)

But the fact that we can even have a field of physics, which describes the universe in a much more compact mathematical form, implies similar conclusions. If physics were completely deterministic and I had an equation which predicted the state of everything at time T, then the universe could even be said to contain zero information (except for the information content of the equations themselves)

I don't think the conclusion that you can represent the universe's state in a much more compact form implies holography, it just implies that the physical universe is very low in entropy and it is possible to have the same amount of information in a much smaller encoding.

God was just a very poor programmer, and his implementation uses way more memory (space) than is actually needed.

 

[Vince]

God was just a very poor programmer, and his implementation uses way more memory (space) than is actually needed.

And we should be thankful for it, unless you can draw me a biological digestive tract in N < 3 spatial dimensions. In which case, I'll split the money with you - although I agree overall with the spirit of your post.