Forums → WEPR → News of the Weird: Mysterious Missile off Cali Coast - pg 6
| 72 | 13751 |
- 72 Replies
The World's most precise clock could reveal that the world is nothing but a hologram.
Our existence could be coded in a finite bandwidth, like a live ultra-high-definition 3-D video. And the third dimension we know and love could be no more than a holographic projection of a 2-D surface.
A scientistâs $1 million experiment, now under construction in Illinois, will attempt to test these ideas by the end of next year using what will be two of the worldâs most precise clocks.
Skeptics of a positive result abound, but their caution comes with good reason: The smallest pieces of space, time, mass and other properties of the universe, called Planck units, are so tiny that verifying them by experiment may be impossible. The Planck unit of length, for example, is 10 billion billion times smaller than the width of a proton.
Craig Hogan, a particle astrophysicist at Fermilab in Illinois, isnât letting this seemingly insurmountable barrier stop him from trying.
Hogan is following through on a radical idea to confirm Planck units with two of the most precise clocks in the world. Deemed holometers, each L-shaped laser interferometer will have two perpendicular, 131-foot-long arms to scan for pixelation in the very fabric of space and time. If itâs there, two laser beams (split from a single source) that run through the arms wonât hit a detector at the same time.
âWhat weâre looking for is when the lasers lose step with each other. Weâre trying to detect the smallest unit in the universe,â Hogan said. âThis is really great fun, a sort of old-fashioned physics experiment where you donât know what the result will be.â
The two holometers, now being built in an earth-covered tunnel on Fermilabâs prairie-covered campus, will initially be stacked almost on top of one another to listen for the same Planck-scale ânoise.â Once the machine is calibrated and environmental interference is accounted for, Hogan says it should only take a matter of minutes to see if the devices simultaneously see it.
Should Hoganâs team detect something significant, they will then separate the machines and run the experiment all over again. If the noise they measure next isnât correlated between the machines, it could be the calling card of a limit to space-timeâs resolution.
Inspiration for the holometer came from such a noise picked up by an experiment called GEO600. Designed to detect gravity waves â" ripples in space-time caused by things like colliding black holes â" the machine is a laser interferometer like the holometer will be, yet has arms 15 times longer and a laser designed to detect lower frequencies (to be sensitive to gravity waves, if they exist).
Experimental physicist Hartmut Grote, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, said he and his colleagues at GEO600 have been unable to pinpoint the source.
âIn the past, [Hogan] became a little bit driven, even excited for some time, that this noise could be a result of the holographic principle,â Grote said.
The holographic principle, derived from weirdness theorized to occur at the boundaries of black holes, says reality could be a 3-D projection of a 2-D plane of information. Itâs much the same way a hologram printed on a credit card creates the illusion of a 3-D object but, as Hogan explained, we canât perceive the 2-D surface.
âWe could be living inside that 3-D projection, with the truer vision of it as a 2-D sheet hidden by scale,â Hogan said.
Ultra-precise devices such as laser interferometers might be able to detect noisy fluctuations in the projection, which Grote says might âblow upâ the pixelation to a larger, detectable size. Yet Grote suggests Hoganâs holometers, which are slated to be finished in a year, may be too late if progress with GEO600 continues on-schedule.
âWe are not at the point where we can verify the noise we discovered is holographic, but we can falsify it as soon as our instrument is more sensitive than the limits of Hoganâs theory,â Grote said. âIâm confident we will reach that point over the next half of a year and find the source of the noise.â
Hogan maintains his cheeriness for the endeavor, even if much of the physics community remains skeptical. But Grote says Hogan has good reason to be upbeat.
âI think itâs a reasonable design to measure this effect, even though I think itâs unlikely heâs going to measure something,â Grote said. âIf anything happens, heâll put to rest another exotic theory about the universe.â
If he does find a limit to the universeâs resolution by exploiting the cosmosâ possible holographic underpinnings, however, Grote said it will make waves.
âIt would be a very strong impact to one of the most open questions in fundamental physics,â he said. âIt would be the first proof that space-time, the fabric of the universe, is quantized.â
Article