Can someone explain the holographic universe theory to me in the dumbest way possible? My mind can’t grasp what it means.
In: Planetary Science
Full disclosure I do not like the holographic principle, so I will try to not be biased but no promises. First I should explain what a hologram is.
Holograms and holographic projections are essentially what you imagine when you hear that word, but it helps to be rigorous here: a lower dimensional thing looks higher dimensional. Okay that’s not really rigorous, but it’s the important part. When we see them in real life, you are probably imagining some sort of sticker or something that is effectively two dimensional, but “projects” a three dimensional image. The image isn’t actually three dimensional, it just appears as such.
Okay let’s handwave away some things like Penrose’s work on black holes and black hole information and a bunch of other things. The work Bekenstein did here is the important bit. The Bekenstein Bound shows us how much information can be stored in a volume. Don’t worry about what this means, it isn’t that important to the question, what is important is the connection here to the holographic principle. Essentials only, information is “stuff” and “things” and “events”, just everything, including how things happen. And he figured out that the most information you can stuff into a specified volume depends only on the surface area of that volume, not the volume itself. In other words, you can model a black hole using the 2D surface of the event horizon, and it would take care of everything inside that surface. But wait, the universe isn’t a black hole (or is it…), and there’s less information here than the density, why can’t the universe be a projection from a 2D surface infinitely far away? That’s this. Essentially, every degree of freedom you perceive can work as modeled on a 2D surface. You still have all three degrees of freedom, it’s just that one of them is “fake” kind of.
Where I disagree with it is that to me, this is just another dimension. It fits the definition of a dimension (a separate degree of freedom) so why isn’t it just a dimension? The holographic principle can be true, but it’s just a different way to look at the three macro spatial dimensions.
Oh and some people have proposed the universe is born of the birth of a black hole, I’m not too fond of this one either but the math checks out we could be in one. This one I don’t like just because it doesn’t really do anything. It doesn’t say anything about how the universe works or began it just hand waves questions.
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