
A Hologram Suggests How Space Could Pop into Existence - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/75/story/a-hologram-shows-how-space-could-pop-into-existence
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Animats
So what predictions does this hypothesis generate? Anything?

 _" Science is prediction, not explanation"_ \- Fred Hoyle.

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naringas
but a prediction is an explanation about what will happen in the future

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Retric
That can include measurements of the past. If I predict that oil formed here,
I can then drill to validate the prediction.

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chiefalchemist
> "The 3-D space we experience might be generated by a two-dimensional reality
> or even a zero-dimensional system, one that cannot be thought of as residing
> in space at all."

But isn't this effectively saying that the dimensions-based model for universe
is incorrect? I'm trying to understand the comparison when it seems to be
saying the benchmark is wrong.

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jakupovic
I read it as saying our 3-d world can be encoded in ways other than a stream
of x y z coordinates. Possibly a stream of 1-d "a" coordinates, which are
translated to our reality by folding the "a" stream in different directions
like a physical hologram.

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qubex
Am I allowed to voice my opinion that this is one of worst written articles on
an abstruse concept to have yet graced the Hacker News front page?

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thunderbong
Thanks!

After reading the article and not understanding anything, I thought maybe
someone at HN made more sense if it than me, so I checked the comments.

Glad to know I'm not the only one for whom this was incomprehensible!

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keyle
Maybe I'm just a practical, basic, person but I don't understand a single
thing about that article. Then I read the HN comments hoping for clarity, and
came out even more confused...

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norcalli
I'm honestly tired of the personal anecdotes in scientific articles. I don't
want to have to scan 3 paragraphs through before I get the gist of the
article.

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trhway
I think the holographic principle and its, especially popular, interpretations
are stretching things too far, way outside of the black hole as one can say.
There is so far nothing to indicate that the specific conditions inside black
hole giving rise to the observed "holographicity" of the entropy of the black
hole are applicable outside of the black hole.

What we have - the space of possible states, i.e. entropy, inside a black hole
has significantly reduced cardinality, i.e. it is equivalent to the
cardinality of the black hole surface in this case. That means that either
there is strong additional dependency/correlation arises between the states of
the black hole components/particles (doesn't sound that unrealistic - we do
have similar, using very wide notion of similarity of course :), process on
the other side of the spectrum - Bose-Einstein condensate (and the similarity
may be pretty high
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.0315.pdf)](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.0315.pdf\))),
and which in effect is kind of equivalent to the loss of some degrees of
freedom, or may be there is a loss of degrees of freedom due to the black hole
spacetime distortion - gravity distorts the spacetime, and the black hole is
the ultimate case of it with the local time basically disappearing for the
external observer, and thus we have a perceived loss of degrees of freedom -
as observed by external observer. I.e. it may as well be that the entropy
inside, as would be perceived locally, may still be "normal 3D" in the local
spacetime while it is basically frozen from the POV of external observer (and
thus what we observe is the projection of the rest of that spacetime taken at
the point where(when) a given dimension is "stuck"), and thus externally
observed "2D" entropy is just stuck in time, ie. a projection of, the "normal"
3D entropy of the black hole insides. Drawing some parallel with light coming
out of deep gravitational well - the lightwave is stretching like the time
dimension is getting "slower" until it stops in the case of black hole. The
stopped dimension and an absence of the dimension - not much difference math-
and observation-wise.

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yters
If we can just name zero dimension space as 'not space,' we could solve the
problem much more easily by renaming 'space' as 'not space' instead of relying
on convoluted analogies with holograms.

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oarabbus_
I fail to see how this simplifies anything or makes more sense than the
provided analogies; could you elaborate?

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yters
I fail to see how the hologram concept explains anything. Is my OS bootup
process a hologram? Is the evolution of the universe from the big bang a
hologram? What is not a hologram?

'Hologram' just seems to be a loose analogy for the concept that 'something
complex came from something simple.'

On the other hand, the holographic nail sounds pretty neat.

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throwaway_law
>I fail to see how the hologram concept explains anything.

Think about where Classical Physics breaks down (at the big bang and black
holes/singularity).

So if you, as a higher dimensional being, fall into a black hole (a lower
dimensional space) where does all that higher dimensional information go? Well
like a hologram, the idea is the information gets recorded on the surface of a
black hole, or event horizon. In short its like a 3D object being able to
exist in/on a 2D plain.

If a hologram doesn't work for you, maybe try thinking about fractal geometry
where the perimeter of an object can measure infinity while simultaneously the
volume is perfectly measurable and well defined.

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yters
Or a bitstring...

It's unclear what is so important about the 'hologram'.

What they really seem to be trying to do is explain how we get something from
nothing, with ever more convoluted mathematical abstractions to try and avoid
the inherent logical contradiction.

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pharke
The basic idea is that all of the information required to recreate a higher
dimensional space is encoded in a lower dimensional space. The information is
"spread across" the lower dimension in that each point encodes a lower
fidelity representation of the whole.

Seriously though, look up how holograms work. There's a lot of thought
provoking aspects to them and it's no wonder they've inspired a lot of novel
thought about the nature of the universe.

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JoeAltmaier
That doesn't seem to explain anything. The higher-dimensional space isn't low-
resolution. We don't live in a flickery monochrome universe?

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pharke
The higher dimensional space has "full resolution" since it is the summation
of all of the data in the lower dimensional space. Any given part of the lower
dimensional space has less "resolution" or information because it is a smaller
sample of the whole.

