The Holographic Universe and You: Part Three

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

QUESTIONS (AND ANSWERS): If the Universe is a hologram, then presumably our Moon, the planets Mars and Venus, as well as Titan (moon of Saturn) are holograms too. So, how can one land space probes, as we’ve done, on a hologram? The answer, I suspect, is that our space probes too were holograms, so it wasn’t as if you had a solid 3-D object land on an illusionary 3-D planet or moon. Both the probes and the planets were illusionary 3-D objects; or conversely, both were (or are) solid albeit 2-D objects.

How can you have a solid 2-D surface when anything that’s solid must have a third dimension to it? The answer seems to be that the operative word here is ‘surface’ and the surface, itself, is 2-D even if there is structure beneath it.

EVIDENCE: You’d be aware that if you examine an image at an every closer and closer detail, the image will become fuzzier and fuzzier or grainier and grainer. The newspaper picture breaks up into little individual black and white dots – granulation, or noise in the signal; the TV picture is just a series of pixels at high magnification. So too, if our Universe is a hologram image, that image should get ever fuzzier and start to break up when resolving it to an every greater and greater level of magnification.  Unfortunately, ordinary astronomical instruments aren’t powerful enough to see the required level of magnified detail that would suggest whether the Universe’s alleged hologram imagery begins to break down and become granulated. But, one type of instrument just might have (the required resolution), and just might have (found evidence that the Universe is a hologram).

The technique in question is instrumentation designed to detect gravitational waves, something predicted by Einstein’s excursions into relativity theory. One such instrument or research project is called GEO 600, located in Hanover, Germany.  Gravitational wave detectors like GEO 600 are essentially fantastically sensitive rulers that can probe the smallest unit of space-time which brings the microscopic quantum structure of the Universe within reach of current experiments.

Now GEO 600 has detected unexplained noise in the signal it’s actually designed to detect. This noise matches the loss of resolution prediction of what one would be expected to detect if the Universe were but a holographic image viewed at extreme resolution, resolution GEO 600 is capable of. Interestingly, the prediction of this ‘holographic noise’ was made by Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, and director of the Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics. When Hogan first realized this, he wondered if any experiment might be able to detect the holographic blurriness of space-time. That's where the GEO 600 comes in. GEO 600 has come across the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time ceases behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into ‘grains’, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in.

According to Hogan, "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram." "If you lived inside a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring," Hogan says.

The initial match between what holographic theory suggests, and actual observation, while interesting, is still tentative enough that no one is yet claiming absolutely that GEO600 has found 100% proof positive evidence that we live in a holographic universe. It is still way too far too soon to say absolutely. A mundane source of the noise is still a very real possibility. However, further investigations are planned, so stay tuned!

CONCLUSION: I can take neither credit nor blame for such an idea as that given above. You’ll find it in many relatively recent physics, astrophysics and cosmology books and articles, often as a subject in its own right – see the further readings section. The concept of our Universe as a hologram is certainly one of those ‘far out, star scout’ ideas, but all it takes is a bit of thinking outside of the box – not that that makes the idea right. But, it’s a concept worth playing around with, just for fun if nothing else.

Further readings:

Amoroso, Richard L. & Rauscher, Elizabeth A.; The Holographic Anthropic Multiverse: Formalizing the Complex Geometry of Reality; World Scientific Publishing Company, Hackensack, New Jersey; 2009:

Bekenstein, Jacob D.; ‘Information in the holographic universe: theoretical results about black holes suggest that the universe could be like a gigantic hologram’; Scientific American, August 2003; page 59:

Cardiff University; ‘Holographic Universe: discovery could herald new era in fundamental physics’; Science Daily, 4 February 2009: [GEO 600 observations]

Chown, Marcus; ‘Our world may be a giant hologram’; New Scientist, January 15, 2009: [GEO 600 observations]

Grote, H. (for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration); ‘The status of GEO 600’; Classical and Quantum Gravity; Volume 25, Number 11, 7 June 2008; page 114043:

Hogan, Craig J.; ‘Measurement of quantum fluctuations in geometry’; Physical Review D; Volume 77, Number 10, 2008; page 104031: 

Lindesay, James & Susskind, Leonard; An Introduction to Black Holes, Information and the String Theory Revolution: The Holographic Universe; World Scientific Publishing Company; Hackensack, New Jersey; 2004:

Talbot, Michael; The Holographic Universe; Harper Perennial, New York; 1992:

Vienna University of Technology; ‘How many dimensions in the holographic universe’; Science Daily, 9 February 2009:

Vitini, Leonardo; ‘Reality: a mere illusion (part 1); The Epoch Times; 13 December 2009:

Vitini, Leonardo; ‘Reality: a mere illusion (part 2)’; The Epoch Times; 20 December 2009:

Wilber, Ken (Editor); The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes;

Shambhala Publications, Boston, Mass.; 1982:

*Time is, IMHO, an illusion. Time has no real independent existence – it can’t stand by itself. If you removed all the matter and energy from the Universe, would there be left anything we could address as time? Time is just our way of keeping track of, and measuring rate of change in matter and/or energy. If nothing ever changed it would be nonsense to talk about time. The flow of time; the arrow of time; is just the flow of macro things changing. If everything were somehow ‘frozen in time’ – like a single frame from a film – there is no actual time that can be discussed or measured. So we don’t in any sense measure something that is time, we measure rate of change and call that time.

Actually you measure rate of change by another rate of change. For example, the rate of change from birth to death is usually measured by the rate of change in position of the Earth orbiting the Sun (years and fractions of years) and rate of change of position of the Earth rotating around on its axis (days and fractions of days). Another example: The rate of change between the beginning of your lunch hour and the ending of your lunch hour is usually measured by the rate of change of the hands of a clock (sixty 360 degree sweeps of the minute hand or a 30 degrees clockwise change in the hour hand) or the rate of change in the numbers on your digital watch, say from 1:00 to 2:00. Translated, a variable or uncertain rate of change (lifespan; length of a lunch ‘hour’) is usually measured by a standard, invariable, predictable rate of change.

Now rate of change is affected by gravity or mass – the greater the mass the greater the gravity and the slower things change from A to B, but that slowness is only relative to someone else also measuring A to B but who is in lesser gravitational field. Rate of change is also affected by velocity. The faster you go, the slower things change from A to B, again however it’s relative to someone else also measuring A to B but who is moving at a lower velocity relative to you. That’s why it’s the theory of relativity!