Hm… was this it?
I completely get that and understand even cautious optimism at this point may be getting ahead of ourselves.
That said I found it interesting that Hogan predicted the noise they are seeing at GEO600 before they saw the noise (not just that there would be noise but, it seems to me, the precise noise they are seeing [hearing? ;)]). Cool coincidence or a possible indication that observation caught up with theory (even if it was serendipitous)?
I think so. Anyway it has sentences like this:
in it, though it goes on to say why there’s not much reason to think this kind of thing applies to our own universe–and why there are some reasons to think it doesn’t apply. (But then afterwards seems to suggest that for all we know it might after all, more work needs to be done etc.)
-FrL-
I sent the link to the original article to a formerly thought to be cool coworker today. The response was heavily leaning toward this article challenging one’s faith and the existence of a supreme being. She viewed it as a threat to her faith.
Sheesh. Everybody’s about religion nowadays. I prefer scientific explanations. While tough to understand without some kind of education and background, at least they can be explained. I don’t want to argue theology and the validity of same.
Again: Sheesh.
And why doesn’t it confirm the existence of God to her? Doesn’t it imply that someone is working the hologram projector? That our real bodies and souls are out there and this is just an illusion? I saw this article this morning and that’s immediately what I thought, not that it makes God fake, but it explains God one more layer than in the past.
Thanks for the clarification. What is the next step in detectability if LIGO is improved? Right now, if I understand correctly, we’d expect to detect a black hole merger on the order of supermassive black holes at the center of a galaxy merging (and I recall that there has been some recent imaging of SMBH duos orbiting each other in at least one galaxy), correct? What type and scale of event could be detected if LIGO becomes more precise? Are we still theoretically bound to black hole events of some sort, or do other types of events become “visible” ?
Sure, but it’s going to bite them in the ass when Thrawn shows up.
Didn’t some guy already come up with this theory, a long, long, long, long time ago? I’m pretty sure I remember my philosophy teacher freshman year telling me about how Plato used the word “atom” to describe the theoretical smallest possible unit of matter. Of course the word atom means something different now, but etymology suggest that thinkers have always considered the nature of this idea.
So, the universe might be like This?
You could easily make the argument that if the universe is “holographic” that it makes things like souls, the afterlife, ESP, telepathy, ghosts, seeing in the future, and even God much more believable/consistent than trying to make such things work in the way we think the universe works now.
Holographic CAN mean that while you appear to be right there right now (and only right there and right now), you are a manifestation right there and right now caused by processes/information spread “all over the place” in some other place or dimension. And it would be the same for every other person and thing in our universe/dimension.
If that stuff is all over and overlapping in that other place, I think with a little imagination you could come up something a bit more scientific than todays theology to explain what theology tries to these days.
I keep picturing a far side like god character saying in a booming god like voice:
“Now THATS a vibration isolation table!”
sorry lame holography humor there 
I’m not an expert on the holographic principle, but I am a grad student with some experience in cosmology, so I will attempt to clarify some misconceptions.
This is not how the expansion of the Universe works. If it were, holographic principle or not, we would expect elementary particles to get bigger, and then objects would get bigger, and then the Milky Way itself would get bigger. Instead, cosmologists say that distances are increasing. Suppose spacetime is indeed pixellated - the analogy then is not making the pixels bigger, or ‘zooming in’, but adding more pixels.
You are perhaps thinking of Democritus’ theory of matter being composed of atoms; ‘atom’ in Greek means smallest uncuttable thing. This is inherently different from spacetime being composed of smallest possible units - that idea has only been around since the 20th century.
I’m only familiar with the concepts in a rather superficial way, but, as far as I understand it, it works something like this: For some time, it was assumed that black holes had basically zero entropy. Then it was recognized that this leads to something puzzling, namely that, if you put something with a high entropy into a black hole, the entropy in total appears to be decreasing, which is something entropy shouldn’t do, what with the second law of thermodynamics and all. So, eventually, it was argued that black holes are actually at a maximum of entropy, and the maximum of entropy within a given region of space is given by the Bekenstein bound, which, somewhat surprisingly, gives its value to be proportional to the area of the black hole’s horizon (measured in Planck areas), not, as one would perhaps expect, to the volume within the horizon. Now, entropy is correlated with information content, and this means basically that the information content of the black hole is also proportional to the area of its horizon, and that’s more or less the holographic principle right there; extend that to the whole universe, and you see that the total information content within its three dimensional volume is encoded in its two dimensional horizon, just like one of the flat hologram things on your credit card encode a three dimensional picture. So that’s that then, and not terribly mysterious after all; that whole new-agey holographic universe crap is just an example of what happens when scientists try to explain one concept not well understood by most people – black holes and their entropy – with another concept not actually well understood by most people – holograms.
I get the more pixels analogy of how space expands. But if I am understanding this right (and admit I could be way off base here) our 3D world is a sort of “projection” from a 2D quantum shell, or sphere. Each bit on the shell correlates to one bit of 3D space. Thing is there is more volume than surface area of the shell. That relates to the 10[sup]-16[/sup] “blurriness” rather than the Planck length stuff of the 2D sphere.
So, if space is expanding the sphere is getting bigger and “pixels” are being added. However, the volume of the sphere would increase more quickly than the surface area of the sphere. As such wouldn’t things inside the sphere keep getting “blurrier” to allow the pixels to match 1:1 with the stuff inside the sphere?
Hmm, you make a good point. Either you’re correct, or this is where the analogy breaks down. I don’t know enough about the holographic principle to say which.
Quoth Whack-a-Mole:
Put it this way: I’d guesstimate it at about a 90% chance that there’s some mundane explanation for this noise. But 1 in 10 is pretty good odds for a lottery ticket with a jackpot this big. So despite the fact that I think that this is probably nothing, it’s still very exciting.
This is outside my area of expertise, so take this with a grain of salt. I am a cosmologist, but I am not your cosmologist, and I am probably not licensed to practice cosmology in your jurisdiction. But I don’t think that the 2-d surface where the information is “really” stored can be localized using the same coordinates as are used for the 3-d projected space, and you can’t say that the surface is the edge of the region which contains the volume. So the area of the information surface can, if necessary, expand at the same rate as the volume of the projected space.
Quoth squeegee:
After the next round of upgrades, scheduled for some time next year, LIGO should be in the range where we’ll expect to see one event per year, or so. We don’t know precisely how many, since it depends on how common such events are in the Universe, and that’s one of the things we’re hoping to pin down with these measurements. Black hole mergers are the best known candidates for detection, but there’s also reasonable hope that, as gravitational wave detectors advance, we’ll also see things like neutron star mergers, supernovas, and even more-or-less normal stars just orbiting each other more-or-less stably. And there’s also the possibility of picking up gravitational waves from really weird sources that we don’t know whether they exist, such as cosmic strings.
For what it’s worth, I tried using 14 billion LY as the radius of the universe, and got 1.6E-15 for the graininess, not too far off the article’s value.
Chronos, from the abstract of Hogan’s paper, he says
Do you understand how the GEO600 differs from the LIGO such that GEO is more sensitive to this effect?
Yes, this was topic of much discussion in the relativity group here when the result came out. To sum up, in an interferometer, you have a mirror placed at an angle between the two arms, to split and recombine the beams. In LIGO, the photons only need to reflect off of that mirror once, so any transverse uncertainty in the beams is only relevant once. In GEO, however, they bounce off of that angled mirror many, many times, which gives the uncertainty a chance to add up.
My original impression of black holes had them sucking all this matter in and spitting it out, og knows where. But thinking about it, you’d expect the other end to have just the same properties, wouldn’t you, sucking everything in from that side. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a black hole on that side? I can sense a headache coming on, anytime soon.
You are talking about a White Hole which is essetially the time reversed version of a black hole. Oddly, a White Hole is black too IIRC. Strange things and no one knows if there such a thing. I think current theory allows for one but no one has seen one.
With the added qualifier that if they did exist, they’d be very hard to miss. I won’t swear that there isn’t a mouse in my apartment, just because I’ve never seen one, but I’m pretty darn certain that there’s no elephant in my apartment. By the same token, we’re also pretty darn certain that there aren’t any white holes in the observable Universe.