Is the universe a hologram?

On this channel I tackle a variety of scientific concepts and ideas that bear profound implications on our existence and our understanding of ourselves and the universe. And among my travels to find and dig into those ideas one stands out that seems to rise above all other concepts in just how profound it could be, rising above all other human ideas whether they be religious, metaphysical, scientific or philosophical. It is the question of whether the universe is real at all.

I've already made a video scratching the surface of this concept, it's called "Is the Universe real? Or is it a computer simulation?" and can be found on this channel but a recent paper may shed some further light on the concept and expand on the idea that if the universe isn't as it seems, we may some day know its true nature because it may turn out that if reality is just an illusion then it may be scientifically testable and possible to prove.

Physicists and cosmologists have long known that something intuitively doesn't seem quite right with the universe. First of all, it doesn't seem to have a point of existing other than perhaps to allow consciousness to exist which amounts to the universe perceiving itself into existence. And second, it's perfectly and strangely fine-tuned for exactly that leading eminent cosmologist Fred Hoyle to once have said that the universe looks like a quote unquote "put up job" and leading no less than Albert Einstein to speak of reading the mind of God and how the "old one" does not play dice with the universe. As it turns out, he sort of does, but that's a subject for a future video.

While those sentiments might have seemed out of place during the times of Hoyle and Einstein where a focus on evolution, reason and scientific testability were the rule of the day, they no longer are and what once might have seemed like hogwash physicists uttered under their breath has now entered the realm of real possibility and it may well be the case that our universe is in reality a kind of hologram.

Think of it like this. On your bank card or on a holographic sticker you see an image that seems to be three-dimensional. It's not, it's flat and two dimensional and amounts to a trick of light that makes it look 3d. The universe may be like that as well if new research proves to be solid. Recent studies of the cosmic background radiation, the afterglow leftover from the Big Bang, reveal hints of the early phases of the universe when space and time may not have been as well defined as they are today. This blurry period could be phrased as a holographic phase of the universe that later gave way to a sharper geometric phase, which we are in now.

But that may all be an illusion where a two dimensional nature of the universe somehow leads to the illusion of three dimensions, much like a 3d movie in a theater. It's a flat picture, but if you're wearing the right glasses it will appear to be more. That may also be the case for our universe and we just happen to be wearing the right glasses.

As it turns out, a joint team of UK, Canadian and Italian scientists have released a paper, link in the description below, that reports that they may have the first observational evidence of a holographic universe stemming from studies of irregularities contained within the Cosmic Background radiation. More, the evidence seems to be substantial. So much so that it seems to be equally likely to any other theory explaining those irregularities.

And, this research bears a particularly attractive possibility. To this day, our theories in physics could be termed to be approximations that work really well. The physics of Isaac Newton, for example, allows us to send rockets to the moon, predict the orbits of planets, and build safer cars. But, Newton made an assumption that, in certain specialized cases, makes his physics fall apart and become merely "good enough" for most applications. His assumption was that time ticks at the same rate everywhere in the universe under all conditions. This is not the case.

Einstein's theory of General Relativity further refined things to account for the fact that time ticks at different rates depending on how fast you're moving and, most notably, how much gravity is present. But again, there's an issue. When you get down to the world of the small, the quantum level, General relativity breaks down and we have to use an entirely separate theory, quantum mechanics, to explain what we see. Both of these theories work very successfully for what they do, but no one is quite certain how they relate to each other. They are puzzle pieces that don't fit together and we're missing the linking pieces.

Some scientists believe that the concept of a holographic universe could shed light on the mystery like the picture of a puzzle imprinted on its box and finally reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. And while a holographic universe doesn't go so far as to imply that Einstein's "old one" is at work, or the God of Spinoza guides our existence, it does add some weight to Hoyle's viewpoint that the universe sometimes looks like a big "put up job".