That way I'm the star of a television show and thus the center of everyone's attention.

Thank-you! Thank-you! I adore all my fans!

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All holography theory is about is dimensional reduction. That's IT. We generally think of the universe as a four-dimensional place: 3 space dimensions, 1 time dimension. You can describe the location of anything in spacetime (up to some quantum limit) with four numbers. The holographic principle says that no, we don't really have three space dimensions, we have two. The third is....for lack of a better term, an illusion that we can extrapolate from the other two. The problem is, when you're INSIDE a structure built like this, it's awfully hard to see.

Without getting into too much detail, Einstein's relativity posits a smoothly curving universe, while the uncertainty present in quantum mechanics describes a certain amount of "jitter" or "static" at subatomic scales (due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, if you must know). This is the conflict at the heart of modern physics. String theory, loop quantum gravity, matrix theory, all of those are attempts to resolve that conflict. Holography is something that pops out of the math used to generate these potential solutions. It's not just "making stuff up," as a prior poster said--it's spinning out internally-consistent math and seeing if it matches with our experiments on the world. The reason this discovery is potentially SO HUGE is that holography is one of those conjectures that comes out of the math. If this the experiments are right, then we finally have an experimentally-based handle to stick on all this crazy math.

Putting all that aside, it's posts like this that make me think that science fiction is bad for science. Because by putting forth magical thinking like "Could we somehow manipulate the graininess of space-time to travel faster than light, or look further across the cosmos?" you're missing out on the really beautiful, essential, and important findings. Questions like these obfuscate the good stuff!

Argh. io9, stick to real science fiction, rather than trying to interpret science journalism as if it were science fiction. The good science fiction authors, Stephenson, Gibson, they understand the science but don't go flying too far into the stratosphere on comparatively anemic booster rockets.

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Planck Units are what you get when you start dealing with the universe in terms of units that make fundamental sense to the universe.

Most of them are pretty accessible if you know a bit of algebra a dash of calculus and have some basic quantum mechanical equations at your disposal. If you do some work you arrive at this notion that the smallest anything can be in the universe (or at least according to what you get when you run the numbers in the equations) is somewhere on the order of 10^-35 meters, and that anything below that ceases to be coherent in terms of what we know about reality.

I had a physics TA that helped me run through this stuff. I kept him for a couple of hours after class and he walked me through it, because I'd just read "A Brief History of Time" and had some questions.

And I don't know if this is new. Can anyone help me out on this one? I thought there was always some cosmic ambiguity built into space-time as it were because of the Heisenberg principle. Did they find a different limit or something?

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It all makes perfect sense now. What I'm wondering is, which is the display and which is the processor? Us here, or the info on the edge of the universe?

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cache.gawker.com/assets/images/io9/2009/01/Veal-Home.jpg

Is the universe made up of tiny pieces of veal?

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He once wrote "As a final interesting aside on the subject of fish, the Vescica Piscis symbol is a very basic representation of the holographic process in which intersecting circular wave patterns produce three dimensional images. Physicist David Bohm believes the hologram to be an analogy for his vision of a vast interconnecting universe, in which every part is in some sense a reflection of every other part."

Who the hell is that in the screencap, anyhow?

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if pixel comes from "picture element"

we could call these information "bits" or "grains" of spacetime

exels or "existence elements".

Or does that sound too Microsoft?

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Okay, never mind.

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Sure, that could be a kind of "space pixel", or a kind of resolution in space, but it really doesn't imply that space is any kind of projection - it just means that space isn't infinitely continuous all the way down. Which, given the atomic theory of matter and the particle-wave duality of light, nobody should have expected it to be, anyway.

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And yes. We are.

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