Academy of Sciences of Heroesland

Our universe is just a kind of hologram.

God is just a projection of ourselves, and vice versa.

With the "Holometer" device, specialists from the Center for Astrophysical Research at the Fermi Laboratory hope to prove or disprove the crazy hypothesis that a three-dimensional universe, as we know it, does not exist. According to them, our universe is just a kind of hologram.

The theory that the universe is a hologram is based on the recently emerged assumption that space and time in the universe are not continuous.

They supposedly consist of separate parts, points – as if from pixels, which means that it is impossible to infinitely increase the "scale of the image" of the universe, penetrating deeper and deeper into the essence of things.

Upon reaching a certain scale value, the universe turns out to be something like a digital image of very poor quality.

Until recently, this theory was not taken seriously. Only recent studies of black holes have convinced most researchers that there is something to the "holographic" theory.

The fact is that the gradual evaporation of black holes over time, discovered by astronomers, led to an informational paradox – all the information contained about the insides of the hole would disappear in this case. And this contradicts the principle of conservation of information.

But Nobel laureate in physics Gerard 't Hooft proved that all the information contained in a three-dimensional object can be preserved in two-dimensional boundaries that remain after its destruction – just as the image of a three-dimensional object can be placed in a two-dimensional hologram.

The "crazy" idea of universal illusoriness first arose with the physicist from the University of London, David Bohm, a colleague of Albert Einstein, in the mid-20th century. According to his theory, the whole world is arranged in much the same way as a hologram.

As any, however small, section of a hologram contains the entire image of a three-dimensional object, so each existing object is "embedded" in each of its constituent parts.

- It follows that there is no objective reality," Professor Bohm concluded at the time.

But can this illusoriness be "felt" with instruments? It turns out, yes. For several years now, in Germany, at the gravitational telescope built in Hanover, Germany, GEO600, research has been conducted to detect gravitational waves, vibrations of space-time, which are created by supermassive cosmic objects.

However, no waves have been found in these years. One of the reasons is the strange noise in the range from 300 to 1500 Hz, which the detector has been recording for a long time. They greatly interfere with its operation.

The researchers searched in vain for the source of the noise until they were accidentally contacted by the director of the Center for Astrophysical Research at the Fermi Laboratory, Craig Hogan.

He stated that he understood what the problem was. According to him, the holographic principle implies that space-time is not a continuous line, and most likely consists of a set of microzones, grains, a kind of quanta of space-time.

Is the universe an illusion?

- Today, the accuracy of the GEO600 equipment is sufficient to record the vibrations of the vacuum occurring at the boundaries of the quanta of space, those very grains from which, if the holographic principle is correct, the universe consists," explained Professor Hogan.

According to him, GEO600 has just stumbled upon a fundamental limitation of space-time – that very "grain", like the graininess of a magazine photograph. And perceived this obstacle as "noise".

The detector readings currently exactly correspond to the calculations of scientists, and it seems that the scientific world is on the verge of a grand discovery. Experts recall that once, extraneous noises that annoyed researchers at Bell Laboratory during experiments in 1964 already became a harbinger of a global change in the scientific paradigm: this is how relic radiation was discovered, proving the hypothesis of the Big Bang.

The first data obtained with the help of the new device will begin to arrive at the end of this year.