A pedido del público

I've received countless emails (one, yesterday) and petitions (one, just now, my brother Matias telling me as he saw me opening blogger.com "it's been a while since you've updated your blog") to resume my blogging activities. So without further delay I'll start rambling about the latest boludez that I happened to stumble upon. I don't want to dither in grandiose yet circular thoughts about writing something worthwhile and of epic proportions; otherwise this blog will persist in its silence and barrenness.

The boludez in question is not quite a stupid thought per se. The stupid thoughts are my own meek attempts to understand the mind-boggling implications of said boludez.

Basically, succinctly and in short, the GEO600 (a complex "machine" that looks for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes) 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.

Not content with this, Craig Hogan, the dude that predicted the "noise" before it was actually detected by the machine, said that "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time. If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

How's that for a Monday morning thought to be lodged in the wrinkles of your frayed, hangover brain as you're trying to get to grips with the mind-numbing office routine?

The article is quite a long (as it should be, to try to explain such a bizarre concept) and of course, the idea could well be true according to present theories, proofs, etc.

I'll make a vain and hopeless attempt to explain the 2499 words article about quantum physics in but a few (with a bit of copy/pasting, of course!).

Black holes contain "information" (tricky word). According a widely affirmed principle, information cannot be destroyed. So when a black hole vanishes, all the information about the star that formed it can't simply vanish. This is known as the black hole information paradox.
A dude solved the paradox by saying that a black hole's entropy (i.e.: information) is proportional to the surface area of the event horizon (the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for anything coming round).

Now, to quantum physics (i won't explain quantum physics in a bracket [ok, i will, basically, you can't observe phenomena without altering the observed result, especially true at a VERY small scales, among many other things, there are properties of quantum physics that challenge "normal physics", one of them has to do with the fact that information can be in two different places at the same time, that information affected in one place can affect the equivalent information in other without any actual "phsyical process" happening to the other piece of information, etc]): theorists have shown that quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates.

From this it gathers that the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole - not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram.

One more premise before it all goes mumble-jumble: theoretical physicists have long believed that quantum effects will cause space-time to convulse wildly on the tiniest scales. At this magnification, the fabric of space-time becomes grainy and is ultimately made of tiny units rather like pixels, but a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. This distance is known as the Planck length, a mere 10 to the power of -35 metres.

And this is when shit hits the imaginary fan of theoretic physical bollocks: if space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe. In order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. Or, as Hogan says, a holographic universe is blurry. You can tell if you were living in a Hologram by measuring the blurring.

So... mind boggled enough? This kind of theory makes you think that the talking bush set on fire, the parting of the water and all that stuff the old religions invented are not that far-fetched after all. I mean, who on earth can believe on a holographic universe? And I better not get started with string theory, multiverse or some of the other crazy stuff physicists are coming up with.

Joko

P.s: You can read the full article here.