Science News: Sit back, listen carefully, put on a thinking cap, and enjoy learning we live in a hologram
Science News‘s ace reporter on astrophysics and cosmology, Ron Cowen, has out this week on line, and in the print issue as well, under the head HOGAN’s NOISE, a most ambitious piece.
Its topic is a brand of mathematically abstract speculative cosmology and pure physics that is not only difficult to describe, but exceedingly short on data. If you think I mean string theory, nice guess, but it’s not that well-worn punching bag.
Cowen examines one respected theorist’s conviction, if not many converts to it, that the universe is in some sense a hologram. And that interference patterns of its finest details are writ largely enough, and distributed widely enough, to be interpreted.
Cowen wisely starts off with a parallel – a literary allusion (from Dr. Seuss) on the ability of big enough crowds of very small things to make enough noise that a very large thing named Horton might hear them. His topic is the potential detection of the itty bitty domains into which some theory divides space and time. On the the geometrical side of this duality it comes to “one ten-trillionth of a trillionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom,” or10-35 meters. Cowen’s protagonist believes that with the right sort of interferometer, a jitter or sort of noise might show up in the machine’s spectra that confirm such an irreducible unit of spacetime.
I have checked. Every word of this piece is plain English, or plain enough for a non quantum-physics specialist to understand. But I am afraid that I get lost between the definition of what a hologram is, and how the Schrodinger wave interferences among the teeny domains not only share information instantly across space but produce a signal that can be compared to noise.
I think what we have here is illustration of the greatest fear of generally well-qualified science writers who are nonetheless lay people trying to talk to other lay people. Which is that some of the things that get scientists in certain abstracted fields the most deliriously excited don’t survive, even in their essence, translation to words and concepts that the reporter fully grasps. And even if he or she does, that can be made familiar in the space of one article. Metaphors and analogies can help, can often be equally exciting as the most arcane topics, they may capture the spirit of things, but they seldom deliver the precise new information that has dazzled a colloquium’s front-row participants.
Plus, to me a hologram is a pattern on a photosensitive surface. It is left there by the the split arms of a laser beam – one of which reflects off some object and the other bounces among good mirrors and through good lenses. After they merge again their interference fringes and such, if hit again by such a laser beam, project a reconstruction of the 3-D object’s appearance. But that kind of holography is not helping me understand what kind of hologram the universe is supposed to be – do we live in the interference pattern, the reconstructed “virtual” image, or the real thing?
Nonetheless, the story is worth reading. Cowen is a dedicated reporter with a nose for where his beat’s gems are to be found. It says here that this line of work could lead to the reconciliation of relativity and quantum mechanics. Issues of remote causality are in play. Just knowing such work exists is worth it. I just wish I GOT it.
How many old timers out there remember the fuss over Stephen Wolfram‘s fat book A New Kind of Science? It said the universe is a computer program. I read the book; it’s still on my shelf with a forest of sticky notes jutting from it. I wrote about it. I did not understand it. I thought I could, but I just couldn’t.
- Charlie Petit
