Is our universe a hologram?
— Written by Sneha Rao and Viswonathan
In a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas had the audience wowed by the Princess Leia effect, a 3D video that was playing without any background. Taking a step further, Black Panther used this same technology with enhancements that allowed characters to interact with a 3D navigation system as well as a remote-driving system. These 3D visual projections of a person, place, or thing called Holograms, have helped push storylines forward in ways both big and small.
Let’s figure out how they work.
The idea is pretty simple. Holograms are created when a laser beam is split into two separate beams using an angled mirror. This then forms an object beam and a reflected beam. These two beams that are heading in different directions are reflected off of other angled mirrors. The object beam is then reflected off of the object and finally onto the end surface, while the reflection beam is directly incident onto the plate. As these two beams meet, the hologram is created.
How significant are they in real life?
We actually come across holograms more often than you think in our day to day life! Fighter pilots and astronauts have been using this technology for as long as two decades now to both display important information in their helmets. NASA has recently come up with HoloLens, with the help of which the ground crew can see what the astronauts see. They can also draw arrows and write instructions on the helmet’s wind visor to assist them with tasks on the space stations!
Cool, right?
With the help of this technology, counterfeiting money has become difficult as each note has a hologram representing its authenticity, which is hard to replicate. Holograms also served as a boon to gamers providing them with Augmented Reality giving them another level of immersion.
With holograms playing a role in leading-edge technology for both the present and the future, some of the new theories put forth by physicists might change our whole perception of the universe!
Scientists believe that the world that we might live in might actually be a hologram!
However, it’s probably not how you imagine it. This does not necessarily mean that the universe in itself is a hologram but that even though it appears 3D to us, it might be 2D in reality.
The theory is called the holographic theory.
How did scientists arrive at this absurd theory?
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawkings is best known for his discovery that black holes emit radiation in small amounts over time. Following this theory, scientists began to question the laws of conversation of mass. If a black hole emits radiation, it should eventually just disappear. However, it doesn’t!
This was a solid contradiction against the theory proposed by Stephen Hawkings.
An alternative, proposed by Susskind and Dutch physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft in the mid-’90s, was that when an object gets pulled into a black hole, it leaves behind some sort of 2D imprint encoded on the event horizon, much like when cartoons run through a wall and leave their outline. When radiation travels back, this data is decoded and imprinted back again regaining its previous forms. In this way, the information isn’t really destroyed!
What was the inspiration behind applying this same theory to the entire universe?
If you think about it, we have been solving complex 3D physics problems by assuming they are 2D in nature as the math holds for both. This was however first discovered by Susskind early on. However, there were no solid models to support this theory. At least not until Maldacena, an Argentinian physicist involved in studying the holographic principle, in 1998, demonstrated that a hypothetical universe could be a hologram. This was a huge breakthrough! By putting forth his hypothetical universe idea, he brought together two important theories of physics i.e., the theory of gravity to theories of particle physics, in one theoretical model!
Of course, this still did not mean that our universe was indeed 2D, however, this was enough to sow the seeds of further research in this area in the coming decades.
There have been plenty of researches done questioning the holographic nature of our universe. However, this idea is still debated at large in the scientific community. At the moment, there is no one test universally agreed upon that will prove this mind-boggling theory. The problem that scientists predict is that there will be a limit to how much data can the 2D encodings of the 3D spacetime hold and will it be enough to “pick up” on the way back and restore the 3D features.
“The basic effect is that reality has a limited amount of information, like a Netflix movie when Comcast is not giving you enough bandwidth. So things are a little blurry and jittery.” — Craig Hogan, an astrophysicist at UChicago.
To put it in simple words, let’s follow through with the cartoon analogy. We can only see the outline of the character once it passes through the wall while the rest of the detailed information is lost.
For now, we are limited by the technology that we possess to prove this theory. However, what if it turns out to be true?
How will this affect our day-to-day activities?
If you think about it, not much. We will still be living in the same manner that we are in the same world regardless of it being 2D or 3D. Nothing much would change in the practical world. Similar to the exploration of the Big Bang theory, this would be another theory that we don’t think of while living our day to day lives. However, for the scientific community, this would be revolutionary! It would provide us with a profound understanding of our universe.
