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A Hologram Shows How Space Could Pop into Existence (nautil.us)
10 points by dnetesn on Sept 6, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



"What if the whole universe was just a hologram?"

Well, a hologram is a photograph of an interference pattern which, when suitably illuminated, produces a three-dimensional image.

Confusing the universe with a hologram is like confusing a photo of a car with an actual car.

Pretty impressive that these "scientists" have been researching this topic for over 10 years. Must be nice to have that kind of funding for researching dumb ideas.


> Pretty impressive that these "scientists" have been researching this topic for over 10 years. Must be nice to have that kind of funding for researching dumb ideas.

The Holographic principle in string theory has been around since circa 1978.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

I'm not a physicist but AFAIU it's a fairly mainstream theory as these things go, though perhaps only a minority of theorists pursue it.



What an amazing video, enough technical detail while maintaining high-level concepts - thanks!


It is like confusing a photo of a car with an actual car, except the person confused by it is themselves also part of the photo, and so has obvious reasons to consider themselves and the car three-dimensional.

A better analogy would be those magic portraits in Harry Potter: a non-static two-dimensional environment that carries all the information needed to fully emulate three-dimensional behavior.




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