We live in a world of Tupac and Stephen Hawking holograms. But has it ever crossed your mind that we might be living in a hologram?
Before your mind is blown, "hologram" in scientific terms isn't as literal as you think. It means two-dimensional, but appearing as three-dimensional, just like a hologram.
And a recent study, subject of a polarizing Reddit thread, suggests our universe may have less dimensions than we assumed.
The theory has been around at least since 1994, when a paper suggested our three-dimensional world could actually be “an image of data that can be stored on a two-dimensional projection much like a holographic image,” according to Forbes.
As a result, physicists have been challenging the assumption that the universe is three-dimensional.
The latest results, obtained by scientists at Vienna University of Technology, revisits that question and suggests our universe does in fact behave similarly to a hologram.
It builds off research conducted by physicist Juan Maldacena in 1997, which found mathematical equations describing the universe required fewer dimensions that it seemed.
But Maldacena's research, among others, has only been conducted on exotic spaces with negative curvature. Those spaces are very different from the spaces in our own universe, which is largely flat with a positive curvature.
The new research, in cooperation with the University of Edinburgh, Harvard, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, the MIT and the University of Kyoto, involved years of constructing gravitational theories that live in a flat space, true to our real universe, and confirmed Malcadena's results also hold true in flat space-time.
We could all be living in a hologram.
Citations: Is the Universe a Hologram (Technische University )
