COSMOLOGY: ON HOLOGRAPHIC THEORY AND FUTURE PHYSICS
ScienceWeek
http://www.scienceweek.com
The following points are made by Sten Odenwald (citation below):
1) The holographic theory of the Cosmos is a very exotic idea
proposed by physicists Louis Crane (Kansas State University),
Carlo Rovelli (University of Pittsburgh), Fotini Markopoulou
(University of Waterloo), and Lee Smolin (Pennsylvania State
University). Basically what it says is that any theory of the
Universe has to be one that is based on the flow of information
between various parts of the Universe, just as the quantum theory
of matter is basically a statement about how we extract
information (quantum states) from a set of observations. The
Universe is not a machine, it is a process or a set of
transactions.
2) This idea resembles Princeton physicist John Wheeler's
participatory cosmology theory in which the observer has a hand
in creating the universe that it finds itself in. When you
measure an electron, your experiment decides whether the electron
will manifest a particle or wave aspect, but these aspects are
not determined until after you make the measurement.
3) The holographic theory is also based on a fundamental idea
about black holes discovered by Jacob Bekenstein of Hebrew
University in 1973. A black hole is surrounded by a surface
called the "event horizon". It has been proven, mathematically,
that this surface contains all of the information about the
origin and contents of the black hole. The general mathematical
principle that comes out of this is that all of the information
within an N-dimensional object can be found on an
(N-1)-dimensional surface surrounding that object. When we
examine objects in nature, it is the surface we are examining,
not the thing itself. It is a surprising, and counterintuitive,
idea, but it works.
4) When physicists apply this principle to the information in the
Cosmos, they uncover the idea that all of the information in our
Cosmos is coded in what you might think of as 1's and 0's on some
mathematical surface (called the screen) that is three-
dimensional, not the full four-dimensional extent of our cosmos
in spacetime. The screen is exactly like a hologram. A hologram
is a two-dimensional medium (film) that contains all the
information needed to reconstruct the original appearance of the
three-dimensional object being photographed. So, at some level,
the Cosmos has holographic aspects to it. The universe does not
consist of things that occupy spacetime. It consists of these
curious screens that we examine, and on which all of the
information about the "actual" thing is coded. It is a very
radical idea, but some physicists think it is one of the most
elegant ways to combine what we know about black holes with the
rest of the Universe.
5) Will the laws of physics change in the future? We don't know,
but there have been some troubling speculations based on what may
have happened long ago during the big bang. When the Universe was
still less that one second old, it probably underwent several
freezings as the physical laws by which particles and forces act
changed. We can uncover some of this change in the accelerator
labs at CERN, Stanford, and Fermilab, so we are pretty certain
that it happened in a big way when the Universe was starting out.
6) Some cosmologists have speculated that, in the future, the
Universe may undergo yet another freezing as some new physical
state begins to percolate and form bubbles of a new phase within
the space of our current Universe. By that time there will be
little left of the regions of space where our laws of physics
work. The current accelerated expansion of the universe exactly
fits in with the theoretical idea of space making a
transformation from one phase to a lower-energy one.
7) The next round of changes may not be all that spectacular
because there is not much energy left in the Universe that
already has a temperature only a few degrees above absolute zero.
But consider this: If any of the dozen or so fundamental
constants were to change by less than 1 percent from their
present values, life might be made impossible. Atoms could become
slightly more tightly bound together in molecules so that it
would be hard to break them apart in life-sustaining chemical
reactions. Also, the current cosmic energy level is only 2.7 K
above absolute zero, but that "zero" could be a billion degrees
above the next energy level for the vacuum. The next change might
reignite a new big bang in every cubic inch of space around us
today, and we would be annihilated. Don't lose any sleep over
this. It could happen tomorrow, or a hundred trillion years from
now. It could also happen the moment after you read this
sentence.
Adapted from: Sten Odenwald: Back to the Astronomy Cafe. Westview
Press 2003, 183,186. More information at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813341663/scienceweek
ScienceWeek
http://www.scienceweek.com
--
Best,
Frederick Martin McNeill
Poway, California, United States of America
mmcneill@fuzzysys.com
http://www.fuzzysys.com
http://members.cox.net/fmmcneill/
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Phrase of the week :
"There is no doubt that great revolutions of human scientific
thought will occur in the next century, and in the century after
that, and in thousands of centuries afterward. So which of our
current pet scientific dogmas will be among the first washed away
by new facts and sudden clarities?" -- Anonymous
)))Snort!)
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