Our World May Be A Giant Hologram

The German-British Gravitational Wave Detector team has been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, the detector has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described.


If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan has an even bigger shock in store: If the detector result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.