
New experiment at Fermilab focuses on nature of space itself - jonbaer
http://couriernews.suntimes.com/2014/08/26/new-experiment-fermilab-focuses-nature-space/
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onion2k
One of the most incredible things about this sort of project is how many
people work on it. This is a beam-splitting laser interferometer so sensitive
that it can measure beam jittering in the Planck length range ... yet the size
of the main team is about half that of the company that makes Minecraft.

The work these people do is incredible.

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danbruc
The experiment is looking for an effect 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger
than the Planck length.

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deeviant
What it would mean to confirm the universe was in fact a hologram, what
implications would this have for our physical understanding of the universe,
are they any existential implications, like is our existence is actually an
illusionary side-effect of some other more <complicated|simple> process?

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CamperBob2
_On a TV screen are pixels, small points of data that make a seamless image if
you stand back, they said. Scientists think that the universe’s information
may be contained in the same way, and that the natural “pixel size” of space
is roughly 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom, a distance that
physicists refer to as the Planck scale._

Hmm, I've seen better analogies for holograms, to put it mildly. Pixels on a
screen don't convey any sense of self-similarity at multiple scales.

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wcoenen
You seem to be thinking of fractals instead of holograms.

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CamperBob2
What happens when you break a hologram in half?

What happens when you break a TV screen in half?

Looks like a lot of people with voting privileges don't know what a hologram
actually is.

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wcoenen
Although it is true that you can reconstruct a holographic image with only a
piece of a hologram plate, you do lose information. The spatial resolution
will get worse and the field of view will be reduced. I don't think you're
supposed to lose information when you zoom in on a true fractal.

Anyway, I think the part of the article that you quoted (about the TV pixels)
was just explaining the idea that space could turn out to be discrete if you
zoom in enough.

