Ryan Patrick Broderick
Ryan.Broderick@gmail.com
@Ryanhatesthis
For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.
If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.
(Read the rest of this insanity - it is insanity, right? - at New Scientist.)
It’s funny because of how much sense this makes. Also, I think I remember drunkenly being told by my friend Jonsense (Ex-Genius) that there’s a point in space where reality actually appears to be pixelated.
Also, this is funny because it fits into a short story I wrote in Sophomore year of high school about how in the very very very far future we destroy everything on earth with bombs and then the last line of the story is the first line again meaning it was doomed to happen forever (LOL mad deepz right?). But it fits because what if we made a gigantic super computer super far in the future that made a projection of our history and that’s what we’re living in right now.
Sorta like Futurama’s God computer.
omg I wanna smoke weed and think about this until I frighten myself.
