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The Universe as a Hologram

Started by ablprop, October 24, 2010, 01:25:52 PM

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ablprop

Has anyone read Susskind's book The Black Hole War? This idea of the universe as a hologram is absolutely boggling my mind. I can't get any good feel for it, other than the idea that everything is a surface, layers upon layers of surfaces.

Anyway, Susskind makes the statement (not an exact quote, but this is the meaning I took) that this idea is pretty much accepted in the scientific community now. Is that hyperbole, or is it really the way most in the field see things? And how can we get a good layman's picture of this? Where's our "balloon analogy"?

theatheists

I'm not sure how you are referring to it as a Hologram?   Reality is in it self relative, as is time.   It depends on a unit called 'spacetime' and that can bend at high speeds and theoretically high mass fields (gravity).  This certainly can be seen as a illusion I guess.   I was more interested in the "Big Crunch" opposite of the "big bang" in the theory we have an oscillating universe.  Given if we have enough mass to retract we could in theory be re-living the same universe (that's spacetime as well) that happened before the last "Big Crunch" and thus repeating ourselves over eons of time and matter.

It's all right here E=mc^2   (things like energy and matter tend to equal each other around light speed)
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ablprop

OK, I'm going to screw this up, but I'll try.

In The Black Hole War, Susskind describes how a discovery about the entropy of black holes leads to the idea that the universe is a hologram. A black hole is the maximum possible entropy. Equate entropy with information, and a black hole is also the maximum possible information in a location.

(I'm sure Hackenslash will rip me a new one for such sloppiness; but I'm here asking, not telling.)

The discovery was that if you toss a single piece of information into the black hole (the example used is a photon with a wavelength equal to the radius of the event horizon of the black hole), the radius of the event horizon increases. But the weird thing is, the black hole doesn't get bigger by one unit of volume; it gets bigger by one unit of area. In fact, the increase of entropy of a black hole is always proportional to the increase in area.

From this comes the idea that the entire information content of the volume bound by the black hole can be described by an area equal to the area of the event horizon of the black hole. But since nothing can contain more entropy (and therefore more information) than a black hole, then any volume in the universe can be totally described by an area that surrounds that volume.

That's the cartoon version.

But there's lots I don't understand. Again it comes back to this idea that the universe has three large spacial dimensions, yet is expanding into some other dimension, so that the universe has no edge (like the surface of a balloon). I'm having a lot of trouble blending this image with the image of a two-dimensional surface describing the entire content of the three-dimensional universe.

Just wondering if anyone else has read the book or encountered these ideas elsewhere, and had additional insight.

TheJackel

I will put this is the easiest of terms.

The concept is that everything is information and is thus not real in a sense that it's much like the matrix. This means that everything is entirely comprised of patterns, structures, or bits of information. While this is entirely true since Energy as we know it is the Universal Set of all sets. Energy is the substance to existence itself and all information to which existence is made of. This includes you, me, our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, or anything around us to which also includes empty space itself.

The problem with calling our Universe a Hologram is that no matter what reality you exist in, it will always have to be made of something to which includes information. So this is where I disagree with the concept of the Universe being a Hologram. Existence is essentially information/energy in the literal sense.