Posted on 01/15/2009 10:56:37 AM PST by Free ThinkerNY
DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.
For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.
If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, 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."
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
*really weird $hit ping*
I agree; The Great Divorce is one of my favorite books (then again, I like everything that Lewis wrote).
Isn’t the world we now preceive as real enough to deal with?
To simple waves of light and sound
The Vedas described just that without a specific size comparison. Sub-atomic particles and sub-sub-atomic matter.
Okay, I get it... I'm really just a sticky puddle of quivering sub-atomic particles glommed somewhere onto the 2D surface of the universe's boundary 19 gazillion light years away. I only imagine I exist in this holographic dream world. There's also apparently a one-to-one relationship between what is happening in the immediate vicinity of the quivering puddle and what I think is happening in this dream world.
Bizarre. No, seriously scary stuff because almost anything can happen in the various models of the universe as conceived by physicists the last 20 years or so. Well, not anything, but one of these models is going to turn out to be the right one someday and it's not going to be a nice Einstein-modified, Newtonian universe we've all been hoping for, but some weird, weird, weird, hellacious place.
“Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.”
I don’t know how anyone could ever reach such a conclusion. But it sounds awesome.
Of course, it might explain a lot... My projection is broken.
That finally explains how the big “O” got elected!
bookmark
Data, create a holo-deck scenario where there are no more liberals........
Bohm is the bomb.
Loop quantum gravity rules, string theory drools.
Many-Worlds is correct.
Gravity is the only force that might transcend the brane barrier.
That is all.
And Lubo Motl’s IQ is over 165 but he doesn’t really get what you just said.
Oh dear *gawd*. I have yet to overcome my frustration with high IQ's and low wisdom indices (mostly because I have yet to devise anything more quantifiable than my own anecdotal judgmentalism) combined in the same person.
Lubos is Exhibit A.
steve86, consider yourself targeted for quantification ;-)
Hologram Ping...
Maybe our reality (three spatial dimensions, one temporal dimension) was just a big a$$ quantum fluctuation in 2D space that added distance/time to the works. Maybe that was the "Big Bang". I can buy that more than reality is just a holographic projection.
That's a load of BS. It is certain that underlying phenomena understood via theories of physics confound our notion of everyday life. That doesn't change anything about how we understand and experience everyday life.
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