Perhaps the most commonplace and familiar use of a hologram is found on credit cards, such as the Visa “dove” hologram shown here. Holograms appear three-dimensional, but only require a two-dimensional surface to encode that information. (Credit: Dominic Alves/flickr)

The big idea that our Universe is a hologram

Holograms preserve all of an object’s 3D information, but on a 2D surface. Could the holographic Universe idea lead us to higher dimensions?

Have you ever wondered whether there’s more to reality than what we can see, perceive, detect, or otherwise observe? One of the most intriguing but speculative ideas of 20th and 21st century physics is the notion that our Universe, which seems to consist of three spatial and one temporal dimension, might possess additional, extra dimensions beyond the ones we can see. Originally thought up independently by Theodr Kaluza and Oskar Klein in an attempt to unify Einstein’s General Relativity with Maxwell’s electromagnetism, the idea lives on in the modern context of quantum field theory and a specific extension of its ideas: string theory.

But for all of its mathematical beauty and elegance, does it have anything to do with our physical Universe? That’s what our Patreon supporter Benhead, who was thinking about this recent New York Times piece, wrote to inquire about:

“I’ve never really bought into the holographic thing as a physical concept. I’m not even sure how well it works as a mathematical abstraction… in the analogy I thought we were the image but what was “real” was the film.”