THE CHURCH'S FORGIVENESS OF GALILEO IS DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO ITS FAUILURE TO UNDERSTAND THAT IT WAS RIGHT:

Our world may be a giant hologram (Marcus Chown, 1/15/09, New Scientist)

[Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois], 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."

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

One does pity those trend-sucking dilettantes who bought into the fad about the Earth being round.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 16, 2009 3:39 PM