Test to see if the Universe is a Hologram

Experiment test if the Universe is a Hologram

Way back in January 2009, we reported on a theory that the Universe is just a hologram, which explained that for the last seven years German scientists had been conducting an experiment (called the GEO600) to look for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes.

What they found instead was inexplicable noise plaguing their giant detector, after a huge amount of time and effort trying to figure out what this noise was a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics laboratory in Batavia offered a possible, and highly plausible explanation.

Craig Hogan, the physicist in question thinks that GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in.

"It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If the GEO600 result is what Craig suspects it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram!

Fast foward to the later part of 2010 and Craig Hogan has been busy building a holographic interferometer, or "holometer," in an attempt to detect the noise, which could ultimately prove that we are living in a three dimension illusion projected from a two dimensional space.

You can read more about the experiment, and the science behind it at the Symmetry Magazine.