(February 26, 2014 at 3:27 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Anyone have any comments on this?
Be careful with the Talbot brand of the holographic universe with the string theory holographic computational work being done. I'm not sure which to present first.
Talbot's book is based on actual scientific work, but I think he was intentionally and sensationally disingenuous; perhaps to sell books. Talbot has passed since writing his book so we'll never be able to assess his conviction. Talbot is claiming that what we perceive as 3D is nothing more than a projection of information contained in 2D at the edge of the universe. This is a bold assertion and fun to imagine, but testing it would be difficult (a little more on this later).
The actual holographic work being done is computational and deals with information and entropy calculations at a black hole's event horizon. String theory implies 11 dimensions. Calculations and associated papers by Japanese physicists were published last year that show the same state can be achieved with only 10 dimensions. Not exactly the stuff that would support Talbot's claims.
One physical property that was discussed as possible evidence for Talbot's claim was an idea that said if we experience a holographic universe, then measurable information would become 'fuzzy' at a certain point. Fuzzy being analogous to eventually only seeing pixels instead of the picture the pixels together represent. I can't remember how long ago, but a German gravity wave detector claimed to gather this fuzzy data at 10^-16m, much larger than a Planck length. This by no means proved anything, but was thought to be exciting as if to say "there might be something to this holographic universe" stuff.
This lasted until a European gamma ray detector didn't 'see' any fuzzy data down to 10^-48m. The fuzzy gravity wave measurement likely has the burden here due to being larger than the Planck length and the magnitude of error. It simply doesn't bode well for Talbot's ideas.
