Could the entire universe be an illusion? Scientists are actually investigating

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Could the entire universe be an illusion? Scientists are actually investigating

Rob WaughRob Waugh for Metro.co.uk

Tuesday 8 Dec 2015 1:53 pm

Have the world’s scientists been smoking some kind of intergalactic crack?

A Fermilab team has seriously investigated the idea that the entire universe is a 2D hologram.

The far-out idea that our universe could in fact be a two-dimensional hologram rather than a 3D space came from the study of black holes – rather than from scientists smoking intergalactic crack.

Juan Maldacena suggested the idea in 1997, after noticing that many equations we use to understand the universe would work in 2D.

This year, a Fermilab team led by theoretical physicist Craig Hogan investigated, by attempting to measure incredibly small distances using an interferometer.

Their idea was that if the entire universe is a 2D illusion, they would detect some ‘jiggle’ due to holographic noise. There was no ‘jiggle’.

But not everyone is convinced.

‘At least making some effort to make an experimental test,’ Yanbei Chen of Caltech said in a statement.

‘I think we should do more of this, and if the string theorists complain that this is not testing what they’re doing, well, they can come up with their own tests.’
Click to expand...


Read more: http://metro.co.uk/2015/12/08/could...actually-investigating-5552315/#ixzz3tqUcgfS8
 
What if the whole universe is 1D and we're all dots on a line?

Wow that's deep
 
Controversial experiment sees no evidence that the universe is a hologram

http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/...experiment-sees-no-evidence-universe-hologram

3 December 2015 10:00 pm

It's a classic underdog story: Working in a disused tunnel with a couple of lasers and a few mirrors, a plucky band of physicists dreamed up a way to test one of the wildest ideas in theoretical physics—a notion from the nearly inscrutable realm of "string theory" that our universe may be like an enormous hologram. However, science doesn't indulge sentimental favorites. After years of probing the fabric of spacetime for a signal of the "holographic principle," researchers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, have come up empty, as they will report tomorrow at the lab.

The null result won't surprise many people, as some of the inventors of the principle had complained that the experiment, the $2.5 million Fermilab Holometer, couldn't test it. But Yanbei Chen, a theorist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, says the experiment and its inventor, Fermilab theorist Craig Hogan, deserve some credit for trying. "At least he's making some effort to make an experimental test," Chen says. "I think we should do more of this, and if the string theorists complain that this is not testing what they're doing, well, they can come up with their own tests."

The holographic principle springs from the theoretical study of black holes, spherical regions where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape. Theorists realized that a black hole has an amount of disorder, or entropy, that is proportional to its surface area. As entropy is related to information content, some theorists suggested that an information-area connection might be extended to any properly defined volume of space and time, or spacetime. Thus, crudely speaking, the maximum amount of information contained in a 3D region of space would be proportional its 2D surface area. The universe would then work a bit like a hologram, in which a 2D pattern captures a 3D image.

If true, the principle might guide string theorists in their grand quest to meld the theories of gravity and quantum mechanics. And it would imply, rather astonishingly, that the total amount of information in the observable universe is finite.

In 2009 Hogan dreamed up a way to test the idea. One way the holographic principle might come about, he reasoned, is if coordinates in different directions—up-down, forward-backward, right-left—obey a quantum mechanical uncertainty relationship a bit like the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that you cannot simultaneously know both the position and momentum of a particle such as an electron. If so, then it should be impossible to precisely define a 3D position, at least on very small scales of 10-35 meters.

Hogan figured he could spot the effect using L-shaped optical devices known as interferometers, in which laser light is used to measure the relative length of a device's two arms to within a fraction of an atom's width. If it were impossible to exactly define position, then "holographic noise" should cause the output of an interferometer to jiggle at a frequency of millions of cycles per second, he argued. If two interferometers were placed back to back, they would sample distinct volumes of spacetime, and their holographic noise would be uncorrelated. But if they were nestled one inside the other, the interferometers would probe the same volume of spacetime and the holographic noise would be correlated. And if the interferometers were big enough, that correlated holographic noise should be effectively amplified to observable scales.

Now, Hogan, Fermilab experimenter Aaron Chou, and colleagues have done the measurement with interferometers with 39-meter-long arms. Unfortunately for them, they find no evidence of holographic noise. "A correlation that you would attribute to novel physics effects is not seen," says Lee McCuller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who will present the result in a talk at the lab.

Just what the null result means remains unclear, however. Chen says he has never fully understood neither exactly how the experiment works nor Hogan's theory of how the holographic principle originates. What's really needed is some sort of general analysis of what types of theories the experiment can and cannot test, he says.

For his part, Hogan says that the experiment reached the sensitivity it aimed for, showing that the technique has the potential to make further measurements. "For me, the big news is that we have a technique for measuring spacetime at this level," he says.

In fact, he says, the holometer can be reconfigured to look not for an inherent uncertainty in positions, but rather for a jitter in angular orientation in spacetime—in his view another possible sign of holographic noise. Maybe the underdogs still have a chance, after all.
Click to expand...
 
I too attempted to measure spacetime in my basement.

Null result, sadly.
 
http://www.gizmag.com/quantum-theory-reality-anu/37866/

[h=1]Experiment suggests that reality doesn't exist until it is measured[/h]
Researchers working at the Australian National University (ANU) have conducted an experiment that helps bolster the ever-growing evidence surrounding the weird causal properties inherent in quantum theory. In short, they have shown that reality does not actually exist until it is measured – at atomic scales, at least.Associate Professor Andrew Truscott and his PhD student, Roman Khakimov, of ANU's Research School of Physics and Engineering conducted a version of John Archibald Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment – a variation of the classic double-slit experiment, where light is shown to display characteristics of both waves and particles – where an object moving through open space is provided the opportunity (some would say "a choice") to behave like a particle or a wave.
In this instance, however, the ANU team replicated Wheeler's experiment using multiple atoms, which was much more difficult to do than a test using photons. This extra difficulty is due to the fact that, as they have mass, atoms tend to interfere with each other, which can theoretically influence the results.
"An atom is a much more classical particle," Associate Professor Truscott said. "For the theory to hold with a single atom is significant because it proves that it works for particles with mass."
To carry out the experiment, the ANU team initially trapped a collection of helium atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate (a medium in which a dilute gas is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero), and then forcibly ejected them from their containment until there was only a single atom left behind.
This remaining atom was then released to pass through a pair of counter-propagating laser beams (that is, beams moving in opposite directions), which created a pattern to act as a crossroads for the atom in the same way that a solid diffusion grating would act to scatter light.
After this, another laser-generated grating was randomly added and used to recombine the routes offered to the atom. This second grating then indiscriminately produced either constructive or destructive interference as if the atom had journeyed on both paths. Conversely, when the second light grating was not randomly added, no interference would be introduced, and the atom would behave as if it had followed only one path.
However, and this is the really weird part, the arbitrary number generated to determine if the grating was added or not was only generated after the atom had passed through the crossroads. But, when the atom was measured at the end of its path – before the random number was generated – it already displayed the wave or particle characteristics applied by the grating after it had completed its journey.
According to Truscott, this means that if one chooses to believe that the atom really did take a particular path or paths, then one also has to accept that a future measurement is affecting the atom's past.
"The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence," said Truscott. "It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it.”
Even though the findings of the experiment add to the perceived weirdness of quantum theory, the results also validate it. But, even without regard to the weird aspects, quantum physics almost certainly governs the world at the atomic level, and this existence has enabled the development of quantum technologies ranging fromcryptography to solar cells.
From an everyday point of view, our minds perceive that an object should behave like a wave or a particle, quite independently of how it is measured. However, as this experiment supports, quantum physics predicts that it doesn’t seem to matter if a particle or object should show wave-like behavior or particle-like behavior; it all depends on how it is actually measured at the end of its journey.
"Quantum physics' predictions about interference seem odd enough when applied to light, which seems more like a wave, but to have done the experiment with atoms, which are complicated things that have mass and interact with electric fields and so on, adds to the weirdness," said Roman Khakimov.
The first time ever that Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment has been conducted using a single atom, the quantum weirdness represented by this experiment much more closely approaches the macro world in which humans perceive reality, which adds to the significance of the findings.
The results of this research were recently published in the journal Nature Physics
Source: ANU
Click to expand...
 
TheTexan said:
Given that this experiment failed to measure reality, does that mean, for the duration of this experiment, reality didn't exist?

Mind. Blown.
Click to expand...


It didn't exist until they measured it. Almost like you are in a computer sim that only draws the pixels needed for the frame. Kinda reminds me of Schrodinger's cat. This experiment was completed in June.
 
If it turns out that it is, then what illusion fragment is not falsely investigating what? I thought I was confused, but apparently if that's an illusion too, then I'm not.
 
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