For decades, scientists have been considering the idea that our Universe is (or once was) a gigantic and highly complex hologram, in which all physical laws require only two dimensions, but everything around us acts according to three dimensions. As you can imagine, such a hypothesis is not at all easy to prove, but physicists report that they have finally found the first observable proof that the early Universe could ideally correspond to the so-called holographic principle and this does not at all contradict the standard model of the Big Bang.
“We propose to use this holographic model of the universe, which is very different from the most popular standard Big Bang model based on gravity and inflation,” says one of the study participants Nyayesh Afshordi of the University of Waterloo in Canada.
“Each of these models allows us to make different predictions that we can test, and on the basis of this, refine and complement our theoretical understanding of the universe. Moreover, this can be done within the next five years."
To make it clear: scientists do not say that right now we all live in a hologram. They only speculate that at its early stage - within several hundred thousand years after the Big Bang - everything in the universe became a three-dimensional projection, originally created from two-dimensional boundaries.
If you are not at all familiar with the theoretical epic "Our Universe is a Hologram", then here's a little excursion into history. The theory that our entire universe is a hologram dates back to the 1990s, when the American theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind began to promote to the masses his idea that the laws of physics we know do not actually require three dimensions.
So how is the universe around us three-dimensional, but "in reality" it is represented as two-dimensional? The idea is based on the fact that the volume of its space is "encoded" within certain boundaries, or in the so-called field of the gravitational horizon, whose boundaries depend on the point of observation. Before you start laughing, keep in mind that since 1997, over 10,000 works have been written supporting this idea. In other words, she's not as crazy as it might seem at first glance. Well, if only a little.
Now Afshordi and his team have reported that, as part of their study of the uneven distribution of the relic radiation (residual radiation of the Big Bang), they found strong evidence supporting the explanation of the holographic form of the universe in its earliest stages of development.
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“Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and with your perception of time) actually comes from a two-dimensional flat field,” said Costas Skenderis of the University of Southampton and one of the study participants.
“The principle is similar to what we can find in conventional holograms, where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional plane. This, for example, is characteristic of holograms on the same credit cards. However, in our case, we are already talking about the fact that the entire Universe is encoded in this way."
The reason physicists are interested in the holographic principle at all, while the standard model of the Big Bang looks much clearer and more logical, is that there are some gaps in the latter, but these gaps are so fundamental that they slow down the process of our understanding of all physical laws. in general and still in the bud.
According to the Big Bang scenario, chemical reactions led to a very large-scale expansion of the original space that led to the formation of our universe. And at the early stage of her birth, the rate of this expansion (inflation) was colossal. While most physicists support the theory of cosmic inflation, no one has yet been able to figure out the exact mechanism responsible for this dramatic expansion of the universe at speeds faster than the speed of light and growth from the subatomic level to the present. It all happened almost instantly.
The trouble is, none of our current theories are able to explain how it all works together. Take, for example, general relativity, which perfectly explains the behavior of large objects, but at the same time is unable to explain the behavior of the smallest ones. This is already the environment of quantum mechanics, which, in turn, is unable to explain many other things. All this saddens even more when it is necessary to explain how, in the literal sense, all the mass and energy existing in the Universe were initially concentrated in a tiny space. One hypothesis tries to combine both phenomena at once, the other, about quantum gravity, says that if you can drop one spatial dimension, then you can drop gravity in your calculations to simplify the calculation task.
Holographic principle
“It's all a hologram. In the sense that there is a description of the Universe that says that the probability of even a reduced number of dimensions corresponds to everything that we can see after the Big Bang,”says Afshordi.
To test how well the holographic principle of the universe copes with explaining everything that happened at the very moment of the Big Bang and after that event, the team of scientists created a computer model with one time and two spatial dimensions.
When researchers fed the data we know about the universe into this model, including information about observations of the CMB - thermal radiation that emerged just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang - they found no contradiction. Everything fit perfectly. Including relic radiation. The model actually perfectly recreated the behavior of thin sections of the relic radiation, but was unable to recreate larger “slices” of the universe more than 10 degrees wide. This will require a more complex model.
Scientists explain that they are very far from proving that our universe actually was once a holographic projection. However, we now have the fact of obtaining empirical data collected on the basis of real knowledge about the Universe. This fact may ultimately be the beginning of the discovery of a possibility that will explain the missing parts in physical laws in terms of two-dimensional representation. In other words, the work of Afshordi and his colleagues only proves that recklessly giving up the possibility of a holographic model of the Universe is an absolutely unforgivable luxury.
Does this mean that we all now live in a complex hologram? According to Afshordi, this is not entirely true. Their model is able to describe what happened only in the earliest epoch of the Universe, but not its current state. Nevertheless, now it is worth considering how things from two-dimensional space are able to be projected into a three-dimensional dimension, if, of course, we are talking about the universe, and not about credit cards.
“I would say that we do not live in a hologram. But we shouldn't discount the possibility that we could get out of it. Nevertheless, in 2017 you definitely live in three dimensions,”summed up Afshordi.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK