Hasta La Gadget!

3-D is the hottest new trend in movies. But it’s all just filmmakers punking the human brain into perceiving depth in a two-dimensional image. And, according to some theoretical physicists, this may be how the Universe works. Depth is all an illusion of time. The Big Bang never occurred. And you, your family, your pets, every monkey that ever existed, the entire cast of The Jersey Shore, and the starting line-up of the 2010 All-Star game are all two-dimensional holograms. The Universe is a big flat cartoon.

So goes one theory.

The theory of a Holographic Universe has floated around for sometime. But it’s never had any hard data to back it up–it was just an explanation that nicely tied up mathematical loose-ends about black holes and gravity on a chalk board.

However some evidence for the unreality of reality may have showed up last year. The GEO600 is an internationally-collaborative experiment based in Germany that is attempting to detect and measure theoretical gravitational waves–or minute ripples in the fabric space-time. However, the experiment just keeps running into low levels of “noise.” The GEO600 team still plans to continue searching through the noise to detect these theoretical gravitational waves.

But Craig Hogan, a particle astrophysicist with the US Government-sponsored high-energy physics research lab Fermilab thinks the GEO600 team found exactly what they were looking for. Hogan sees this barrier of noise as a blurring or pixelating effect from zooming in too far. He theorizes that this is exactly what one would expect to happen if the Universe were a two-dimensional hologram. And now he and his team want to prove it.

Hogan is overseeing a super-sensitive holometer being developed at Fermilab. The holomter is almost like a super precise clock that will be able to measure the inherent fuzziness of space-time, and may give a clue to it’s true form. Hogan and his team are building two devices to confirm each other’s work. They hope to start collecting data next year.

via Symmetry Magazine