The Universe Is Not a Holograph

What’s the Latest Development?

When the gravitational wave detector GEO 600 found that, on incredibly small scales, there was “blurriness” in the data it gathered, some in the physics community theorized that all our scientific data were merely pixels being projected onto the universe, whose source was really a 2-dimensional reality. This holographic theory of the universe now seems false, having been contradicted by data recently found by the European Space Agency’s Integral gamma-ray observatory. Again, down to an incredibly small scale (10^-48 meter) the observatory found there was no “blurriness” in the data. 

What’s the Big Idea?

The theory of a holographic universe, i.e. that the three dimensions we think we live in are but a projection onto a 2-D surface, comes from certain subsets of string theory which say it is possible to encode all the information of a 3-D volume onto a 2-D structure. “The 3-D hologram that we experience is just how the 2-D structure is perceived at macroscopic scales or low energy levels. It’s still a pretty wild idea, but what it really speaks to is the basic quantum structure of the universe, and certainly not that our existence is somehow less ‘real’ because of it.”