Scientists to Test Whether Universe is Really a 2D Hologram
Have you been feeling a bit flat lately? You think you live in a 3D universe, move about in 3D space, go to 3D movies in theaters that have three whole dimensions, but you might be wrong. Your experience of being a three-dimensional person might just be a result of the limits of your perceptions, like a character on a video game screen you have no way of knowing you’re flat. Instead, you might live in a 2D hologram, with all of the information about our universe encoded in two dimensions in tiny packets 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom (a size called the Planck scale), the “pixels” that make up our universe. At least that’s what the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is going to try to find out. They’ve developed an experiment that will test the theory, called the Holometer. In quantum theory there’s a built-in uncertainty to matter, because there’s no way to know both the exact location and speed of subatomic particles. If space