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do we live in a holographic universe?

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actualfactual

actualfactual

Rising Star
Craig Hogan is trying to find out @ Hogan's holometer: Testing the hypothesis of a holographic universe

Here is some commentary I found on another site

We've all seen holograms before I imagine. I had a really cool Pog Slammer when I was a kid that had a hologram of a skull on it. Holograms encode three dimensional information onto a two dimensional surface, such that the image you see looks 3D even though it's only 2D. Likewise, the space you and I all live in seems to be three dimensional, but it's entirely possible that we are living inside my Pog Slammer. The important thing to take note of is that it's entirely possible to "encode" the state of an entire volume of space just on the boundary of said region. Or in other words, the amount of information in a given region is not determined by the region's volume, but counter-intuitively by its surface area.

If this experiment succeeds in demonstrating that our universe is holographic, this would mean we are essentially "the shadow" cast off by true reality. The three dimensions we live in wouldn't be real, but rather all of our universe would be encoded on its "boundary" and in a strange tribute to Plato we might literally be living in the allegory of the cave.

I wanted to make that last paragraph better, but then I stumbled upon this link (http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/holo/) that I think does a decent job of explaining the Holographic Principle and more importantly what its proof would mean for our objective reality.

edit: A more intuitive explanation. Just as you, a seemingly three dimensional person casts a two dimensional shadow on a wall, the Holographic Principle says that we are three dimensional "shadows" cast by a two dimensional reality. That would mean that the entire universe we see around us would simply be "shadows" of actual "Reality".
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Well, it wouldn't prove that what we are living in isn't real, but it would prove that it isn't the only reality out there. What we are experiencing is definitely real, otherwise we wouldn't be experiencing it at all, but it definitely isn't the only thing that is real either.
 
The Centre said:
Well, it wouldn't prove that what we are living in isn't real, but it would prove that it isn't the only reality out there. What we are experiencing is definitely real, otherwise we wouldn't be experiencing it at all, but it definitely isn't the only thing that is real either.
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This idea (theory?) doesn’t suggest that our “reality” isn’t real. It just says that reality as we perceive it and imagine it to be may be very different than it actually is.
 
It is different and the same at the same time. Reality is to complex to comprehend. The concept of reality has plauged many a mind for centuries.
 
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