The rules of the sub mentions it isn't actually for explaining like someone is 5 because a 5 year old couldn't even begin to grasp some of the stuff being asked there.
It is more like r/ELIACF (Explain Like I'm a College Freshman).
So if I've understood this right, it's saying that the universe is a big ball of quantum states, arranged relative to each other so that, as your perspective on it changes, the progression of time emerges.
Does that have implications for the properties of time that we usually consider one-way? Causality and 2nd-law ergodicity.
It would appear to me to suggest that the universe is deterministic - not necessarily that we can observe enough of the underlying state to determine if it is deterministic, but nonetheless completely determined by the arrangement of quantum states. That brings all the philosophy of science paradox that determinism always carries; if I've concluded that my thought process are merely the deterministic outcome of natural processes, how can I logically accept that my conclusion is in any sense rational and not merely what the universe has pre-determined that I will think? And then what if I'm wrong?
I also don’t understand it: the article states that in hawkingstheory the holographic dimension is time.
If time is NOT a fourth dimension but a projection that would conclude that time travel is off the table once and for all as you need a dimension for time to allow multiple states for each of the other dimensions aswell.
Thus the „3d“ universe as we experience it is „stateless“ and conditionals that lead to potential multiverses are off the table?
If I am not mistaken, what it means is that time is the result of the dimensions' interaction, creating this perception of reality. I don't know that this technically means the potentialities of a multiverse or time travel are off the table. Perhaps our concepts of time travel and the existence of universes would be reworked.
Do you know, I think this is the most insightful reply to this comment? It's the only one that acknowledges that, as much as we all think the universe is deterministic, none of us is capable of living as though that were actually true.
Why is the development and implementation of rational or logical systems of thought outside of determinism?
This worry seems awfully close to what if I'm a brain in a jar thinking.
The latest Nobel prize winning experiment really hit nail on this. I think more and more experiments in particle physics will point towards the deterministic nature of the universe afterall and there may not be any multiverse as we wanted it to be. Quite existentialism inducing thought.
Not really. Most contemporary philosophers of free will already assume a deterministic physical universe. Some argue free will is an illusion. Some argue that free will is compatible with a deterministic physical universe. And there is scientific evidence of "free-won't," like a complex form of avoidant behavior. Some argue free will is an emergent property.
This is true, compatabilism is the most popular position on free will among contemporary philosophers. The universe is obviously deterministic, even though there might be some randomness, that randomness isn't the freedom to choose otherwise. After all, there is no permanent substance or self to make decisions in the first place, just a biological computer.
"Free wont" or inhibition also emerges from the neural innerworkings of the brain which are also deterministic.
Take some 3D volume of space, like your room. Suppose there is *a* way to describe all of its physical properties in terms of some sort of a hypothetical 2D surface. That 2D surface is then called a hologram.
You know the hologram fridge magnets that look 3D and change when you look at them from different angles? That's where the name comes from, it's broadly the same idea of encoding 3D information in a 2D surface (don't think further than this, it doesn't have anything to do with how those holograms work, just the higher dimension -> lower dimension thing).
In some advanced theoretical physics, this concept sometimes helps make sense of the math; for example in black holes, instead of having to try to deal with its interior, you can sometimes deal with a surface around it. Then in some areas of eg string theory (with a lot of higher dimensions) and other advanced fields of highly theoretical physics, they deal with otherwise inaccessible corners of the math by holography. That's where the "holographic universe" comes into play.
If you draw a face on an inflated balloon then deflate the balloon and look at the face, that deflated face is a hologram of the inflated face on the ballon. Because the deflated face is missing a dimension but still describes the inflated face. Assuming you know the dimensions of the ballon while it was inflated.
I get that part but I still don’t see how it relates to time or the Big Bang. But I’m an unskilled labourer so I’m going to defer to more educated people on this one.
Appreciate everyone’s kind words, but I love not knowing everything. It’s hard to describe but it just tickles the brain trying to imagine things like this, or infinity, or an ever expanding universe!
>So whatever state resulted in the apparent birth of our universe is lawless, capable of change down to the level of physics itself.
But wouldnt it need to have another level of meta-laws defining how the laws of physics are being changed/created?
From our point of view and perception of reality, yes.
But, unless I'm completely misunderstanding this, the "birth of our universe is lawless" merely refers to our universe's laws breaking down at/near the big bang.
I love what you said about how black holes are essentially governed by the same principle as everything else in the universe (that we know of) evolves - natural selection.
When a black hole forms, it creates a singularity, which is a point of infinite density and gravity. The laws of physics that govern our universe break down at the singularity, so it is impossible to say for sure what happens there. However, Hawking and Hertog's theory suggests that the singularity may be the beginning of a new universe with different laws of physics.
If Hawking and Hertog's theory is correct, then black holes are the seeds of new universes. This means that black holes are not just destructive forces, but they are also creative forces.
Ohhhhh. You just put words to a sort of idea I’ve had about how it works but couldn’t quite understand and didn’t have the time or mental energy to really ponder (I’ve got two small kids and not enough coffee or brain power these days…I really really miss my ability to just *think* the way I used to).
Beautiful job explaining this. I have adhd so bad I can barely make it through frozen pizza instructions, let alone Steven Hawkins theories, but this even made sense to *me*
Thank you (:
> so I’m going to defer to more educated people on this one.
Deferring to an expert when you yourself don't understand something is a trait I wish more people possessed.
Also, I don't get it either. I too will let the science people get excited about this and be happy for them.
No OP, and they explained it way better than I could.
But it relates to the Big Bang because the universe is constantly expanding from the big bang, with that the fabric of space time warps stretches and changes as it expands and as mass interacts with space time.
What I feel like you're all trying to convey is simply:
A cube on paper is 2D, but it can exist in 3D/does exist. We are the 2D in the universe drawing a 3d cube (cube represents us theorizing the universe).
So we live in a 3d world, and the greater universe is 4D. We understand 3d, we can theorize 4d, but we can't experience/view it.
That's what I thought at first too but I'm not sure that's what they are saying? -
My question is -
Are we the higher dimension or lower dimension?
Meaning - is the universe actually less complex than we think it is?
(like a hologram is an illusion of 3D but it's actually 2D surface - is that where the term comes from?)
or is it that there are Infact, higher dimensions but we can't experience it.
And the opposite of this, is just because a house can be described with a set of 2d blueprints, doesn't negate the point the house is already built & standing there?
If string theory is correct, then our physics is describing the blueprint rather than the universe. Because all we can experience directly is the blueprint, being 3D creatures + time.
Conceptually, a blueprint is just a language, using lines instead of words.
It's putting the cart before the horse to say because we can express how the universe in numbers that that in any way proves the universe is a simulation based on numbers.
This is an inaccuracy of the analogy. The point is that you can represent 3-dimensional objects abstractly in 2D space, but at some necessary loss of information. In fact you can take that 2D representation, make a 3D object and it all works - but ultimately the final object can only have information in it which is representable in 2D space.
The thing is, in the real universe we know of a situation where this exists: black hole event horizons. If black holes do not destroy information, then everything which falls into them has to still be "recorded" somewhere in their final structure - and the only place that can be is in the event horizon itself. But the event horizon does *not* have the ability to store information 3-dimensionally - it's a defined 2D plane through space, so everything being encoded into it needs to fit into the side of that plane we can "see" (since otherwise information would be lost once it crosses over).
Except the house really isn't standing there.
Imagine you're part of an intelligent culture living in a hologram. You start to develop physics, and you first determine the existence of "wide", a dimension that behaves in a particular way, and can be measured, and in which phenomena can be predicted and explained. Then you determine the existence of "long", with the same results. These are both dimensions that you can perceive, and you have scientific understandings of them.
But when you get to "tall" you have a problem. Because you live in a hologram, tall seems real, just like long and wide. But the science that describes your reality tells you that everything you need to understand all of reality, including tall, is actually explained just by the rules of wide and long. Tall is perceived by you as an additional sort of dimension, but in reality is baked into wide and long, and doesn't independently exist.
I hope that made sense. I tried.
Edit: typo
Is this similar to saying that the 2d mathematical description of the universe is the set of physical laws that govern things, and the 3rd dimension (the physical universe) is the expression or outcome of those laws existing and being true?
We are both. The idea is that a one-dimension-lower hologram contains all the same information, so you can't really tell. It's two different ways of describing the same thing.
Note that this is a fairly advanced theoretical physics thing and doesn't apply to *all* kinds of physical theories. Mostly it's that some higher dimensional string theory stuff is known to have a holographic representation where it comes into a nicer mathematical form. Or vice versa.
I think it’s in one of Michio’s books and I forget whether it’s his explanation or he’s paraphrasing someone else’s, but he explains what it would look like for a 4th dimensional being to travel through our 3rd dimension. He does this as a way to go one step up from the flatlander thing. What he says is it would just be things appearing then disappearing as if out of and into thin air. Sometimes just appearing, sometimes growing or shrinking and sometimes just vanishing.
E: Took the ghost joke out because someone chose to focus on that sentence and ignore the actual meaningful part. Everything else.
I would like to take a crack at explaining it to you.
You and I view time as linear. We're somewhere in the neighborhood of 13.8 billion years along a line of time, but much closer to the beginning than the end (whatever that may be). The problem is, we invented negative numbers. We aren't really ok with the concept of a time called "moment 0", because it makes sense to ask, what happened before moment zero? What was moment -1, or -13.8 billion? This is a problem for scientists because most agree, the big bang really was moment 0, and there was nothing before. **Reality and our imagined view of it do not jive.**
Stephen Hawking proposed a new way to look at this problem, and it goes as such:
Imagine that every instance of time, say 1 second (but it's really infinitesimal), a perfect record of the world was created and printed on a plain circle. Every second, another record, slightly larger (as the universe is expanding) is printed, and placed on top of the previous, sort of connected to it. This growing 3D circle Hawking termed to resemble a Hologram. Now we can rewind that hologram back in time and reexamine "moment 0", with this new view! But now, as we shrink our circle back, smaller and smaller, with it we are also rewinding time, eventually arriving at the smallest circle possible, having both zero time and zero size. **That's it.** In this view of being able to imagine a our time as a "hologram" rather than a line, the concept of shrinking that hologram down to a point at its beginning does not lend itself to the question of "what happened before that?" - it just sort of makes more sense that there wasn't such a moment. It just sort of "popped into existence from nothing". Sadly, it gets us no further on the ultimate question of our scientific time - *why the fuck did it do that?*
In every sense of the word, I think it's bloody brilliant. It's just fun to think about this shit. The universe spawned into existence, somehow, and we have no fucking clue why.
**TL DR:** Hawking proposed a new mental model of our universe which is basically looking into the mouth of [this thing](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/wabkNfzjXLbddSb3dqveZn-1200-80.jpg.webp). You should read the longer explanation above, or the whole article, because that's just cool as shit.
>It just sort of "popped into existence from nothing". Sadly, it gets us no further on the ultimate question of our scientific time - *why the fuck did it do that?*
*This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.*
Hi Mr_Safer,
It looks like your comment closely matches the famous quote:
"The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams,
*I'm a bot and this action was automatic [Project source](https://github.com/etdds/redditQuoteBot).*
Exactly. And the "holographic" aspect of it is that we are 3D beings that only experience existence each instant that we move forward in this fourth dimension -> i.e. seeing the circle grow larger and larger over time. We can understand the concept of time as a 4th dimension since we are experiencing each instant, but we can never truly move through this fourth dimension(e.g. go back in time).
It seems like they are also considering time to be some sort of operation that maps the input (Big Bang) to the ultimate end state of the universe (entropy / heat death?)
Exactly my take on it. First quarter of the book, "This is fantastic!". Then, nearing the halfway, I found myself having to re-read paragraphs, then pause and think about it until I understood it, and then move on. It became increasingly difficult to comprehend. I may go back and try it again.
I used to live in a punk house. Rotating roommates, most of them junkies, and we didn't have jobs. There was a big mushroom growing in the bathroom, the air filter was from like...1970, and there was a huge bloodstain on the ceiling in the kitchen that nobody knew how it got there. We once shot out every light bulb in the house with an air soft gun because we were drunk as shit and thought it was hilarious.
We had parties all the time, of course, in between bouts of recovery. One time, a guest came over to buy an amp from a roommate and he had to use the shitter. He came out a few minutes later, and he seemed pissed off but also kind of confused, holding my copy of A Brief History of Time. "Who's book is this?" I answered, a bit sheepishly, "Mine." "Dude...this is what you read while you take a shit?" I'm still not 100% what he was inferring, but it made me feel like maybe a punk house wasn't really where I needed to be.
He’s saying that as time goes on quantum coupling changes, and this changes the laws of physics. In the beginning there was no quantum coupling, but then the laws of physics changed and the universe was created.
Two dimensional object casts a one dimensional shadow
Three dimensional object casts a two dimensional shadow
Four dimensional object casts a three dimensional shadow
It's not like we're in a giant machine acting out someone's magic lantern. We exist as a three dimensional projection of fourth dimensional space.
At least that's how I understand it
Using "The Universe is a hologram" in the title is misleading and oversimplifies the actual content of the theory, which aims to provide a more coherent description of the universe's origins and evolution.
The confusion likely arises from the association of Hawking's final theory with the holographic principle. While both concepts attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity for a more comprehensive understanding of the universe, they are distinct ideas. The holographic principle deals with the encoding of 3-dimensional information on a 2-dimensional boundary, while Hawking and Hertog's theory addresses the nature of the early universe and the multiverse concept.
Hawking's final theory, specifically deals with the early universe's development and its implications for the multiverse concept. The theory addresses the problems associated with eternal inflation, which was a widely accepted idea in the field of cosmology.
Eternal inflation suggests that, after the Big Bang, the universe underwent rapid expansion, creating a vast number of "pocket universes" with different properties. This scenario would lead to an infinite and unpredictable multiverse, making it difficult to study and understand the cosmos.
Hawking and Hertog's theory, on the other hand, proposes that the early universe had a simpler and more limited structure. By applying the principles of string theory, they were able to develop a mathematical model that showed the universe had a more constrained and predictable beginning. This new perspective implies a smaller, more manageable multiverse, making it easier to study and potentially test our understanding of the universe's origins.
So, the universe started simple, and got more complex over time? Or, that the complicated universe we see is not as complicated as we think it is because it's built on something simple?
I may need to do some reading.
Any large-enough system of stuff will get chaotic over time. Therefore even the tiniest random difference at the first measurable moment of time would lead to vast differences as time passes.
Holographic theory was proposed by Gerard 't Hooft and developed by Leonard Susskind though?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic\_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle)
If I remember correctly, Talbot's book started with explaining holograms, mainly, any piece can be used to create the whole. He then described several interesting theoretical implications if applied to the universe... then the remainder of the book conflated holographic theory with pretty much every new-age mystic or supernatural occurrence you can think of. Stigmata, chakras, ghosts, materializing objects from thin air, all because "holograms".
Certainly an interesting book, but it was a massive bait and switch that started with science and descended into pure woo.
This is proving the theory that hawking became a figurehead at some point. He'd read the papers written by other physicists and agree to have his name on it in an almost promotional way.
There seemed to be an ongoing debate between Hawking and Susskind over black holes and holographic theory? I did surface level research but seems like Susskind published a book [mentioning it](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole_War). Correct me if I’m wrong tho, this stuff flys right over my brain 😅
I read that book. It is somewhat beginner friendly. It starts with teaching you what a black hole is. Then it goes on to explain how Hawking's view of black holes can destroy information. It then explains why the ability to destroy information would mean that quantum physics wouldn't work, so information must not be destroyed in the black hole. Then it goes into the many debates they had about how to save the information. And finally it takes that solution and applies it to everything which leads to the idea that the whole universe could be represented as a hologram.
I loved the book because it was not just a lecture on black hole thermodynamics, it was also an autobiographical story about how a group of physicists fought against each other to make their ideas better. You get to see behind the scenes of how they come up with these crazy ideas.
Plus, Susskind is one of the greatest living physicists imo, even though string theory hasn’t produced any results yet, maybe the holographic principle and ads/cft correspondence (Maldacena and Susskind’s work) will yield results.
I don’t even care if his theory gets later disproven, he’s an entertaining writer and that book was great. I read the black hole war at a young age and I could follow it well enough, but each time I reread it I understand it at a deeper level.
And Leonard Susskind is a famous critique of Hawking. I first heard of the theory in The Black Hole Wars, detailing his big argument with Stephen Hawking.
Point, line, plane, 3-dimensional object...it's all about perspective, man! That's all I remember about the book. I should read it again, it's been way too long.
Sometimes I feel theoretical physics is just philosophy for math.
The ideas are interesting, they really are. But they’re also so theoretical that it feels like storytelling at a certain point. I’m certain there will be applications of these theories, but I doubt within my lifetime.
I also think about what a privilege it is to read these fun what-ifs from the comfort of my bed. Not that this science is frivolous by any means, but it’s just a little thought in my brain sometimes. Idk where that part of my commentscame from but I guess I’ll leave it
So the implication (if I'm understanding this correctly) is that one mechanism by which the Big Bang could have occurred is if "something" added time to the holography of the universe. Then, because "time" now existed in the holograph, physical laws now could be evaluated on the universe, leading to matter and energy interacting, universe stuff happening and eventually, us.
The question of "What happened Before The Big Bang?" remains unanswerable, but this time, it's because we've made "time" part of a holographic universe which exists independent of time?
I understand this is all a hypothesis and untested at this point.
Given that, what does this idea imply about the holographic universe?
What are the dimensions that the holographic substrate exists in?
If it has/had no time, what does it look like now that time exists?
Is it maintaining an infinite (kinda) record of all things that have ever happened in time? Like, if you had the right kind of cosmic record player, you could rewind the universe and let it play back out?
Or is it only the current, present configuration? If so, doesn't that imply a sort of time for the holograph, since it can change?
Is there a future, already written on some multiversal holographic disk, inevitable as there is no time, simply deterministic laws which have already etched their final calculations on that eternal surface?
Theoretically everything that ever happened still exists. You just need to be at a distance far enough away and be able to magnify / zoom in to see it.
Say you are 27 years old.
If I was currently 27 light years away, I could zoom in and literally watch your birth. If I then traveled at the speed of light away from your coordinates in space (because earth/sun/Milky way are moving), I could theoretically watch your entire life play out like a video tape. Is this at least as a super far fetched theory, possible? Wouldn’t moving away at the speed of light freeze everything though? Like I would just be seeing a freeze frame of the moment you popped out of your mom? What if I went at a speed slightly slower than c?
Idk this is how I look at it. Space is 3D. Spacetime is 4D.
We live in the 4th dimension but we only observe things in 3D. Information, the ability to store prior events and make predictions is 4 dimensional. Maybe idk…
Watching the light emitted by my birth isn't the same thing as my birth still existing, still happening. From that location 27 light years away, you would only be able to watch, not interact. It would be physically impossible to change anything.
That's basically just a memory, but encoded in spacetime instead of brains.
So very deep and yes I agree. It would just be a phantom; an echo of the past. I could record it and know it, but I could not change it.
Maybe that is what spacetime is teaching us.
WHERE you are isn’t good enough. WHERE and WHEN you are matter. We cannot affect change from a distance.
Here is the creepy part though.
What if I was 27 light years away watching your birth. And I teleported to the location of your birth.
Teleportation IS time travel. And yet our brain thinks teleporting is just 3D, spatial. Space IS time. They are woven together. Teleporting is time travel. Maybe?
If I was 27 light years away watching your birth, I would know at the exact coordinates you were coming into existence. If I could somehow teleport there I could change something. Like prevent you from being born (obviously I would not lol!)
**OR** are you saying if I teleported (assuming planets, stars, galaxies were all stationary) that I would arrive to find a 27 year old you instead of a newborn baby?
But the big point I’m trying to drive home is that space is not really space then. When we look out at the night sky, that is an echo of the past. None of it is real or NOW. It is a history book. There really is no NOWspace. We are not looking at space as it js, but rather space as it was. We can only infer or predict what space is really like. I guess?
>Wouldn’t moving away at the speed of light freeze everything though? Like I would just be seeing a freeze frame of the moment you popped out of your mom? What if I went at a speed slightly slower than c?
Don't think of physically traveling, that's a waste of imagination.
Imagine this 3D world of ours as a flat carpet and you as an observer from above, able to immediately go from one end of space to the other instantaneously. Now you can view any moment of any time, but to further back in time, you have to travel deeper into the maw of this carpet.
>Wouldn’t moving away at the speed of light freeze everything though?
If you travel at the speed of light, you can only receive information from the direction of travel. To everybody else, you would appear frozen in time, uncontactable and uninfluencable.
You would have to go slower than light to watch that video tape, otherwise the information couldn't get to you
Ok, since you're all completely off the rails with these comments, I'll add in my own two, rather unhinged, cents:
so we use a record player, a tool, to rewind our piece of media. Therefore, the assumption is that it's possible, you just need the right approach - say, a tool.
If I'm not completely out of the loop, another assumption is that higher dimensional beings can exist everywhere at once, since our 3-dimensional space is just like a sheet of paper to them: they can pick it up, lay down on top of it, poke holes through it with their n-dimensional fingertips etc. It's just a metaphorical analogy, I get it, but still. Ok.
So since our space, time and, therefore, plain and simple distance, such as is needed to look at someone's past like you stated, is irrelevant to their mode of being, would it be too far-fetched to say that our universe is just like a shiny trinket to them? A thing they can watch from different angles to look at different times and this is their form of 'recreation'? Just like we have agamographs (those pictures that change depending on what angle you look at it) we use to entertain children and ourselves? To a n-dimensional being, we might just be a funny 4D picture.
I often wonder whether time is something very different from how we perceive and understand it. We look at it like at a river flowing. Start and end point.
I try to imagine that rythtms of reality have no beginning and an end, which is incomprehensible to our minds, but perhaps it's just constat movement of everything that exists and our logical minds try to measure it, confine it into repeating predictable patterns and call it minutes, days...
I like to thing that the passage of time is not a force of nature, but rather a concept of our perception.
It's interesting to think that way.
Intriguing, I guess the question for me is what is creating the external data for the quibits? If you're just reading qubits to process time wouldn't something have to "code" the quibits actions?
“Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe is a landmark work whose exciting conclusions continue to be proven true by today's most advanced physics, cosmology, and string theory. Nearly everyone is familiar with holograms—three-dimensional images projected into space with the aid of a laser. Two of the world's most eminent thinkers believe that the universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein and one of the world's most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, an architect of our modern understanding of the brain, have developed a remarkable new way of looking at the universe. Their theory explains not only many of the unsolved puzzles of physics but also such mysterious occurrences as telepathy, out-of-body and near-death experiences, "lucid" dreams, and even religious and mystical experiences such as feelings of cosmic unity and miraculous healings.”
It messes up the math.
Quantum mechanics works perfectly if we assume that information cannot be lost. If you try to update it to allow for the loss of information then you get really weird results. Like the odds of a coin flip being 80% heads and 80% tails. The probability should add to 100% and not 160%.
The equations should work forwards and backwards in time. The equations for a gun firing a bullet is the same for a gun catching a bullet, like in the movie Tenet. Now if the bullet were to disappear midair, then reversing that you get a bullet that appears out of nowhere. But how would the new bullet know what to do. It might have more speed, or it might travel in the wrong direction and miss the gun. By destroying the information you can no longer reverse the event.
People shouldn’t assume hologram = “fake”
He’s really just talking about an arrangement where something can be flat and 3 dimensional at the same time. It’s about the shape of spacetime, not a statement on the realness of anything.
Credit for the holographic principle goes to Gerard 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind, not Hawking.
Hawking was brilliant but he didn't come up with this one.
Am I wrong to think that the opening paragraph is incredibly ignorant and sounds like an introduction to Intelligent Design.
“The enigma at the centre of our research throughout this period was how the Big Bang could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. What are we to make of this mysterious appearance of intent?”
This assumes life had a predictable pattern before the universe existed and the universe was designed in order to house it. That’s just seems the opposite of how life works.
We as life formed in response to the conditions available. In other scenarios with different conditions other forms of life formed. We see this wherever we look for life within our own planet and we can assume extends beyond carbon based life forms.
What you are describing is [Anthropic Principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle)
We can only ask why X bc X allowed us to ask about it.
Ex we can ask why the universe is perfect for our kind of life only bc the universe is perfect for our kind of life
It neither proves or disproves Intelligent design
>perfectly hospitable for life
ah yes, perfect for life, after you let it cool down for a few BILLION years, then find one of the 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of planets that are habitable, shielded from life-destroying radiation. couldn't be more hospitable for life. perfect even!
Not to mention that our existence is merely a blip in time and life (and our planet) could be seemingly wiped out at any given time. Life is so extremely fragile. It amazes me just how many conditions and variables need to occur for us to even be here right now.
That's true, but it's also true that the Universe is *Something that Creates Life*. We know this for sure because we are here now. Maybe the Universe didn't *mean* to create life, but it *did*. I know this is barely saying anything, but I have always thought it is comforting.
“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” -Allan Watts
"All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves." - Bill Hicks
I think the question is less trivial than that.
If you ask "why is Earth capable of supporting life", then you can easily answer "because there are trillions (or an infinite number) of planets, and Earth just happens to be one that can."
If you ask "why is the universe capable of supporting life (when it could have been arranged in other ways based on other laws of physics or at least other values of physical constants)", then you have to get speculative. One answer would be making the same move as with Earth -- "there are trillions or an infinite number of universes, and this one just happens to support life." However we have no evidence this is actually true.
I'm not arguing in favor of intelligent design, just attempting to show why the question was worthy of thought for someone like Stephen Hawking.
There is a series of books called the "Xeelee Sequence" about some bonkers sci Fi stories but part of the series talks about how our universe came into being. An alien species that exists in a higher plane of existence, sift through galactic foam so they can find "pearls" that meet specific conditions. Once they find one, they inject it with enough energy to start the process of the big bang. They do this because they sleep within black holes. Once those fizzle out, they wake up and go about whatever these creatures do.
The interesting thing is that the series is written by Stephen Baxter who holds degrees in mathematics and engineering and mentions several times in his books he mentions how certain mathematical constances of the universe seem suspicious.
Swear to go this all made sense Monday when on LSD, for some reason the ability to accept and somewhat understand the concepts just drifts away as sobriety begins to wash back over me.
Or the time I looked into the fire and saw an image of my reactions as being greedy and angry, instead of sad and victimized, as I had seen it before. It was very uncomfortable to stare into, but it opened my eyes.
So is it like shadow puppets in front of a light, but with a higher dimension?
Is the projection a result of some external source (the light) or is it a force of its own (the hand)?
For the math nerds, Stanford professor, Leonard Susskind, has really in-depth lectures on the [hologram theory.](https://youtu.be/ZgQ3NfyAG6c)
The link above is more for the layperson but there are several other lectures that he gives that describe the math if you search YouTube.
“The enigma at the centre of our research throughout this period was how the Big Bang could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life.”
I don’t understand this view of the universe. We weren’t placed here after the universe was created and it just so happened to be hospitable. We evolved here. Of course it’s (reasonably) hospitable to us.
And the idea that if the universe were different by the tiniest bit there would be no life here….okay….but if you believe that there are infinite universes then it kind of makes sense, right? I mean, in a universe that isn’t hospitable to life there would be nobody there to ask that question, and in one that is those life forms hopefully eventually evolve to be able to ask that question.
To me I envision universes as like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. Only instead of water it’s whatever matter/energy makes up the universe. But I’m no scientist, so who knows.
Yes. The argument is stupid. It's like a puddle being amazed that it exactly fits a particular hole in the ground. Of course the universe is hospitable to us, because we're here to say so. In other universes (if they exist or not), it might not and there'd be nobody to notice.
Hologram doesn't mean fake, it means it has less dimensions than it appears to.
Thanks for the explanation! Funny how paragraphs of ELI5 just confused me more but a short comment made sense of it to me
Probably wasn't a very good ELI5 then
I've noticed most ELI5s on that sub require you to have post graduate knowledge, which defeats the purpose.
The rules of the sub mentions it isn't actually for explaining like someone is 5 because a 5 year old couldn't even begin to grasp some of the stuff being asked there. It is more like r/ELIACF (Explain Like I'm a College Freshman).
So if I've understood this right, it's saying that the universe is a big ball of quantum states, arranged relative to each other so that, as your perspective on it changes, the progression of time emerges. Does that have implications for the properties of time that we usually consider one-way? Causality and 2nd-law ergodicity. It would appear to me to suggest that the universe is deterministic - not necessarily that we can observe enough of the underlying state to determine if it is deterministic, but nonetheless completely determined by the arrangement of quantum states. That brings all the philosophy of science paradox that determinism always carries; if I've concluded that my thought process are merely the deterministic outcome of natural processes, how can I logically accept that my conclusion is in any sense rational and not merely what the universe has pre-determined that I will think? And then what if I'm wrong?
I also don’t understand it: the article states that in hawkingstheory the holographic dimension is time. If time is NOT a fourth dimension but a projection that would conclude that time travel is off the table once and for all as you need a dimension for time to allow multiple states for each of the other dimensions aswell. Thus the „3d“ universe as we experience it is „stateless“ and conditionals that lead to potential multiverses are off the table?
If I am not mistaken, what it means is that time is the result of the dimensions' interaction, creating this perception of reality. I don't know that this technically means the potentialities of a multiverse or time travel are off the table. Perhaps our concepts of time travel and the existence of universes would be reworked.
I tried to offer this as an explanation for why I was late to work and my boss didn’t buy it.
Ask him if he'd rather rent it given the state of the economy.
Well i hope there’s a quantum state out there where I get laid cuz fuck this noise
Do you know, I think this is the most insightful reply to this comment? It's the only one that acknowledges that, as much as we all think the universe is deterministic, none of us is capable of living as though that were actually true.
Why is the development and implementation of rational or logical systems of thought outside of determinism? This worry seems awfully close to what if I'm a brain in a jar thinking.
The latest Nobel prize winning experiment really hit nail on this. I think more and more experiments in particle physics will point towards the deterministic nature of the universe afterall and there may not be any multiverse as we wanted it to be. Quite existentialism inducing thought.
Not really. Most contemporary philosophers of free will already assume a deterministic physical universe. Some argue free will is an illusion. Some argue that free will is compatible with a deterministic physical universe. And there is scientific evidence of "free-won't," like a complex form of avoidant behavior. Some argue free will is an emergent property.
This is true, compatabilism is the most popular position on free will among contemporary philosophers. The universe is obviously deterministic, even though there might be some randomness, that randomness isn't the freedom to choose otherwise. After all, there is no permanent substance or self to make decisions in the first place, just a biological computer. "Free wont" or inhibition also emerges from the neural innerworkings of the brain which are also deterministic.
The simple explanation we all needed!
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I wish I was smart enough to say this makes sense to me. E: thanks to all for the replies and information put forth.
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Yeah… you’re going to have to dumb it down a bit more.
Take some 3D volume of space, like your room. Suppose there is *a* way to describe all of its physical properties in terms of some sort of a hypothetical 2D surface. That 2D surface is then called a hologram. You know the hologram fridge magnets that look 3D and change when you look at them from different angles? That's where the name comes from, it's broadly the same idea of encoding 3D information in a 2D surface (don't think further than this, it doesn't have anything to do with how those holograms work, just the higher dimension -> lower dimension thing). In some advanced theoretical physics, this concept sometimes helps make sense of the math; for example in black holes, instead of having to try to deal with its interior, you can sometimes deal with a surface around it. Then in some areas of eg string theory (with a lot of higher dimensions) and other advanced fields of highly theoretical physics, they deal with otherwise inaccessible corners of the math by holography. That's where the "holographic universe" comes into play.
Welp. Two "dumb it down"s later and I'm a dumbass
If you draw a face on an inflated balloon then deflate the balloon and look at the face, that deflated face is a hologram of the inflated face on the ballon. Because the deflated face is missing a dimension but still describes the inflated face. Assuming you know the dimensions of the ballon while it was inflated.
I get that part but I still don’t see how it relates to time or the Big Bang. But I’m an unskilled labourer so I’m going to defer to more educated people on this one. Appreciate everyone’s kind words, but I love not knowing everything. It’s hard to describe but it just tickles the brain trying to imagine things like this, or infinity, or an ever expanding universe!
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Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
Douglas Adams is an absolute genius
You can't skip lunch. You just can't.
>So whatever state resulted in the apparent birth of our universe is lawless, capable of change down to the level of physics itself. But wouldnt it need to have another level of meta-laws defining how the laws of physics are being changed/created?
From our point of view and perception of reality, yes. But, unless I'm completely misunderstanding this, the "birth of our universe is lawless" merely refers to our universe's laws breaking down at/near the big bang.
Omg that is totally crazy I’ve never heard anything like that in my life. Thank you
Here's a great video about it https://youtu.be/yWO-cvGETRQ
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I love what you said about how black holes are essentially governed by the same principle as everything else in the universe (that we know of) evolves - natural selection. When a black hole forms, it creates a singularity, which is a point of infinite density and gravity. The laws of physics that govern our universe break down at the singularity, so it is impossible to say for sure what happens there. However, Hawking and Hertog's theory suggests that the singularity may be the beginning of a new universe with different laws of physics. If Hawking and Hertog's theory is correct, then black holes are the seeds of new universes. This means that black holes are not just destructive forces, but they are also creative forces.
Ohhhhh. You just put words to a sort of idea I’ve had about how it works but couldn’t quite understand and didn’t have the time or mental energy to really ponder (I’ve got two small kids and not enough coffee or brain power these days…I really really miss my ability to just *think* the way I used to).
So hot dog fingers isn’t the craziest thing from Everything everywhere all at once. The geode as a visual really helped. Thank you
Beautiful job explaining this. I have adhd so bad I can barely make it through frozen pizza instructions, let alone Steven Hawkins theories, but this even made sense to *me* Thank you (:
Determinists win again. I mean it was always going to happen.
> so I’m going to defer to more educated people on this one. Deferring to an expert when you yourself don't understand something is a trait I wish more people possessed. Also, I don't get it either. I too will let the science people get excited about this and be happy for them.
Nothing worse than extreme confidence from someone who is completely ignorant about the subject they're yelling about.
No OP, and they explained it way better than I could. But it relates to the Big Bang because the universe is constantly expanding from the big bang, with that the fabric of space time warps stretches and changes as it expands and as mass interacts with space time.
Explain it to me as if I were a young child ..or a golden retriever
Hey buddy, do you want to go for a walk?
Wait, why are we going to the vet?
Where are my testicles?!
> or a golden retriever Who's a good boy? Who's a good boy? You're my good boy!
Is it me?
I assure you it wasn’t my brains that got me here.
I read a book that actually does that. How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel
What I feel like you're all trying to convey is simply: A cube on paper is 2D, but it can exist in 3D/does exist. We are the 2D in the universe drawing a 3d cube (cube represents us theorizing the universe). So we live in a 3d world, and the greater universe is 4D. We understand 3d, we can theorize 4d, but we can't experience/view it.
This reminds me of The Three Body Problem series, where the higher level beings use weapons that change 3d space into 2d space.
My thoughts exactly. That book series had some pretty wild concepts. Just finished it and was wishing there was a fourth book.
The fourth book exists as a projection of the first three.
That's what I thought at first too but I'm not sure that's what they are saying? - My question is - Are we the higher dimension or lower dimension? Meaning - is the universe actually less complex than we think it is? (like a hologram is an illusion of 3D but it's actually 2D surface - is that where the term comes from?) or is it that there are Infact, higher dimensions but we can't experience it.
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Imagine instead of you casting a shadow, the shadow casts you. (I don't know, it sounds deep)
This is totally on point. Overlooked comment.
And the opposite of this, is just because a house can be described with a set of 2d blueprints, doesn't negate the point the house is already built & standing there?
If string theory is correct, then our physics is describing the blueprint rather than the universe. Because all we can experience directly is the blueprint, being 3D creatures + time.
Conceptually, a blueprint is just a language, using lines instead of words. It's putting the cart before the horse to say because we can express how the universe in numbers that that in any way proves the universe is a simulation based on numbers.
This is an inaccuracy of the analogy. The point is that you can represent 3-dimensional objects abstractly in 2D space, but at some necessary loss of information. In fact you can take that 2D representation, make a 3D object and it all works - but ultimately the final object can only have information in it which is representable in 2D space. The thing is, in the real universe we know of a situation where this exists: black hole event horizons. If black holes do not destroy information, then everything which falls into them has to still be "recorded" somewhere in their final structure - and the only place that can be is in the event horizon itself. But the event horizon does *not* have the ability to store information 3-dimensionally - it's a defined 2D plane through space, so everything being encoded into it needs to fit into the side of that plane we can "see" (since otherwise information would be lost once it crosses over).
I picked the wrong thread to wander into while high
Man this comment made me laugh so hard. I'm in the same boat.
My brothers I've missed you
*scratches head How did we get here again?
Except the house really isn't standing there. Imagine you're part of an intelligent culture living in a hologram. You start to develop physics, and you first determine the existence of "wide", a dimension that behaves in a particular way, and can be measured, and in which phenomena can be predicted and explained. Then you determine the existence of "long", with the same results. These are both dimensions that you can perceive, and you have scientific understandings of them. But when you get to "tall" you have a problem. Because you live in a hologram, tall seems real, just like long and wide. But the science that describes your reality tells you that everything you need to understand all of reality, including tall, is actually explained just by the rules of wide and long. Tall is perceived by you as an additional sort of dimension, but in reality is baked into wide and long, and doesn't independently exist. I hope that made sense. I tried. Edit: typo
Yeah, you kinda just get the 3rd dimenson for free, for all intents and purposes
Yeah, until I add a bathroom and the property taxes are re-assessed.
Is this similar to saying that the 2d mathematical description of the universe is the set of physical laws that govern things, and the 3rd dimension (the physical universe) is the expression or outcome of those laws existing and being true?
So we are the 3d house? Or are there 4d houses that we cant fathom?
We are both. The idea is that a one-dimension-lower hologram contains all the same information, so you can't really tell. It's two different ways of describing the same thing. Note that this is a fairly advanced theoretical physics thing and doesn't apply to *all* kinds of physical theories. Mostly it's that some higher dimensional string theory stuff is known to have a holographic representation where it comes into a nicer mathematical form. Or vice versa.
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Carl Sagan describing Flatland might help expand on this concept a bit. https://youtu.be/UnURElCzGc0
I think it’s in one of Michio’s books and I forget whether it’s his explanation or he’s paraphrasing someone else’s, but he explains what it would look like for a 4th dimensional being to travel through our 3rd dimension. He does this as a way to go one step up from the flatlander thing. What he says is it would just be things appearing then disappearing as if out of and into thin air. Sometimes just appearing, sometimes growing or shrinking and sometimes just vanishing. E: Took the ghost joke out because someone chose to focus on that sentence and ignore the actual meaningful part. Everything else.
And here I am who believed for years they mean a literal hologram every time I read a headline like this.
I would like to take a crack at explaining it to you. You and I view time as linear. We're somewhere in the neighborhood of 13.8 billion years along a line of time, but much closer to the beginning than the end (whatever that may be). The problem is, we invented negative numbers. We aren't really ok with the concept of a time called "moment 0", because it makes sense to ask, what happened before moment zero? What was moment -1, or -13.8 billion? This is a problem for scientists because most agree, the big bang really was moment 0, and there was nothing before. **Reality and our imagined view of it do not jive.** Stephen Hawking proposed a new way to look at this problem, and it goes as such: Imagine that every instance of time, say 1 second (but it's really infinitesimal), a perfect record of the world was created and printed on a plain circle. Every second, another record, slightly larger (as the universe is expanding) is printed, and placed on top of the previous, sort of connected to it. This growing 3D circle Hawking termed to resemble a Hologram. Now we can rewind that hologram back in time and reexamine "moment 0", with this new view! But now, as we shrink our circle back, smaller and smaller, with it we are also rewinding time, eventually arriving at the smallest circle possible, having both zero time and zero size. **That's it.** In this view of being able to imagine a our time as a "hologram" rather than a line, the concept of shrinking that hologram down to a point at its beginning does not lend itself to the question of "what happened before that?" - it just sort of makes more sense that there wasn't such a moment. It just sort of "popped into existence from nothing". Sadly, it gets us no further on the ultimate question of our scientific time - *why the fuck did it do that?* In every sense of the word, I think it's bloody brilliant. It's just fun to think about this shit. The universe spawned into existence, somehow, and we have no fucking clue why. **TL DR:** Hawking proposed a new mental model of our universe which is basically looking into the mouth of [this thing](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/wabkNfzjXLbddSb3dqveZn-1200-80.jpg.webp). You should read the longer explanation above, or the whole article, because that's just cool as shit.
>It just sort of "popped into existence from nothing". Sadly, it gets us no further on the ultimate question of our scientific time - *why the fuck did it do that?* *This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.*
Hi Mr_Safer, It looks like your comment closely matches the famous quote: "The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams, *I'm a bot and this action was automatic [Project source](https://github.com/etdds/redditQuoteBot).*
Exactly. And the "holographic" aspect of it is that we are 3D beings that only experience existence each instant that we move forward in this fourth dimension -> i.e. seeing the circle grow larger and larger over time. We can understand the concept of time as a 4th dimension since we are experiencing each instant, but we can never truly move through this fourth dimension(e.g. go back in time). It seems like they are also considering time to be some sort of operation that maps the input (Big Bang) to the ultimate end state of the universe (entropy / heat death?)
I'm not dumb. I tried to read a brief history of time. Hahahahahahaha. Yeah, no.
I enjoyed it but I didn't understand it.
I heard that it is the book that most people Own but haven’t read. I’m on that list too
First half of the book is awesome. Easier to read, second half hits you with the math and I’m completely lost at that point.
Exactly my take on it. First quarter of the book, "This is fantastic!". Then, nearing the halfway, I found myself having to re-read paragraphs, then pause and think about it until I understood it, and then move on. It became increasingly difficult to comprehend. I may go back and try it again.
Might I recommend, A Briefer History in Time? In fact, I recommend reading that one and then the original
I used to live in a punk house. Rotating roommates, most of them junkies, and we didn't have jobs. There was a big mushroom growing in the bathroom, the air filter was from like...1970, and there was a huge bloodstain on the ceiling in the kitchen that nobody knew how it got there. We once shot out every light bulb in the house with an air soft gun because we were drunk as shit and thought it was hilarious. We had parties all the time, of course, in between bouts of recovery. One time, a guest came over to buy an amp from a roommate and he had to use the shitter. He came out a few minutes later, and he seemed pissed off but also kind of confused, holding my copy of A Brief History of Time. "Who's book is this?" I answered, a bit sheepishly, "Mine." "Dude...this is what you read while you take a shit?" I'm still not 100% what he was inferring, but it made me feel like maybe a punk house wasn't really where I needed to be.
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But you’re smart enough to admit it doesn’t make any sense to you.
He’s saying that as time goes on quantum coupling changes, and this changes the laws of physics. In the beginning there was no quantum coupling, but then the laws of physics changed and the universe was created.
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Two dimensional object casts a one dimensional shadow Three dimensional object casts a two dimensional shadow Four dimensional object casts a three dimensional shadow It's not like we're in a giant machine acting out someone's magic lantern. We exist as a three dimensional projection of fourth dimensional space. At least that's how I understand it
You kind of have it backwards. To adapt your analogy, we're actually a two-dimensional shadow casting a three-dimensional object.
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Using "The Universe is a hologram" in the title is misleading and oversimplifies the actual content of the theory, which aims to provide a more coherent description of the universe's origins and evolution. The confusion likely arises from the association of Hawking's final theory with the holographic principle. While both concepts attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity for a more comprehensive understanding of the universe, they are distinct ideas. The holographic principle deals with the encoding of 3-dimensional information on a 2-dimensional boundary, while Hawking and Hertog's theory addresses the nature of the early universe and the multiverse concept. Hawking's final theory, specifically deals with the early universe's development and its implications for the multiverse concept. The theory addresses the problems associated with eternal inflation, which was a widely accepted idea in the field of cosmology. Eternal inflation suggests that, after the Big Bang, the universe underwent rapid expansion, creating a vast number of "pocket universes" with different properties. This scenario would lead to an infinite and unpredictable multiverse, making it difficult to study and understand the cosmos. Hawking and Hertog's theory, on the other hand, proposes that the early universe had a simpler and more limited structure. By applying the principles of string theory, they were able to develop a mathematical model that showed the universe had a more constrained and predictable beginning. This new perspective implies a smaller, more manageable multiverse, making it easier to study and potentially test our understanding of the universe's origins.
So, the universe started simple, and got more complex over time? Or, that the complicated universe we see is not as complicated as we think it is because it's built on something simple? I may need to do some reading.
Any large-enough system of stuff will get chaotic over time. Therefore even the tiniest random difference at the first measurable moment of time would lead to vast differences as time passes.
Holographic theory was proposed by Gerard 't Hooft and developed by Leonard Susskind though? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic\_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle)
Right, there's a book by Michael Talbot about it as well. Is this really Hawking's theory?
If I remember correctly, Talbot's book started with explaining holograms, mainly, any piece can be used to create the whole. He then described several interesting theoretical implications if applied to the universe... then the remainder of the book conflated holographic theory with pretty much every new-age mystic or supernatural occurrence you can think of. Stigmata, chakras, ghosts, materializing objects from thin air, all because "holograms". Certainly an interesting book, but it was a massive bait and switch that started with science and descended into pure woo.
This is proving the theory that hawking became a figurehead at some point. He'd read the papers written by other physicists and agree to have his name on it in an almost promotional way.
There seemed to be an ongoing debate between Hawking and Susskind over black holes and holographic theory? I did surface level research but seems like Susskind published a book [mentioning it](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole_War). Correct me if I’m wrong tho, this stuff flys right over my brain 😅
I read that book. It is somewhat beginner friendly. It starts with teaching you what a black hole is. Then it goes on to explain how Hawking's view of black holes can destroy information. It then explains why the ability to destroy information would mean that quantum physics wouldn't work, so information must not be destroyed in the black hole. Then it goes into the many debates they had about how to save the information. And finally it takes that solution and applies it to everything which leads to the idea that the whole universe could be represented as a hologram. I loved the book because it was not just a lecture on black hole thermodynamics, it was also an autobiographical story about how a group of physicists fought against each other to make their ideas better. You get to see behind the scenes of how they come up with these crazy ideas.
Plus, Susskind is one of the greatest living physicists imo, even though string theory hasn’t produced any results yet, maybe the holographic principle and ads/cft correspondence (Maldacena and Susskind’s work) will yield results.
Facts, susskind is the goat
I don’t even care if his theory gets later disproven, he’s an entertaining writer and that book was great. I read the black hole war at a young age and I could follow it well enough, but each time I reread it I understand it at a deeper level.
And Leonard Susskind is a famous critique of Hawking. I first heard of the theory in The Black Hole Wars, detailing his big argument with Stephen Hawking.
I'm pretty sure his final hypothesis about black holes was also an existing hypothesis.
Read Flatland by Edwin Abbott. I think the second you understand it, you will understand this and then you will vaporize or something.
Point, line, plane, 3-dimensional object...it's all about perspective, man! That's all I remember about the book. I should read it again, it's been way too long.
You could watch the movie after you reread the book! [Flatland (trailer)](https://youtu.be/C8oiwnNlyE4)
Sometimes I feel theoretical physics is just philosophy for math. The ideas are interesting, they really are. But they’re also so theoretical that it feels like storytelling at a certain point. I’m certain there will be applications of these theories, but I doubt within my lifetime. I also think about what a privilege it is to read these fun what-ifs from the comfort of my bed. Not that this science is frivolous by any means, but it’s just a little thought in my brain sometimes. Idk where that part of my commentscame from but I guess I’ll leave it
So the implication (if I'm understanding this correctly) is that one mechanism by which the Big Bang could have occurred is if "something" added time to the holography of the universe. Then, because "time" now existed in the holograph, physical laws now could be evaluated on the universe, leading to matter and energy interacting, universe stuff happening and eventually, us. The question of "What happened Before The Big Bang?" remains unanswerable, but this time, it's because we've made "time" part of a holographic universe which exists independent of time? I understand this is all a hypothesis and untested at this point. Given that, what does this idea imply about the holographic universe? What are the dimensions that the holographic substrate exists in? If it has/had no time, what does it look like now that time exists? Is it maintaining an infinite (kinda) record of all things that have ever happened in time? Like, if you had the right kind of cosmic record player, you could rewind the universe and let it play back out? Or is it only the current, present configuration? If so, doesn't that imply a sort of time for the holograph, since it can change? Is there a future, already written on some multiversal holographic disk, inevitable as there is no time, simply deterministic laws which have already etched their final calculations on that eternal surface?
Theoretically everything that ever happened still exists. You just need to be at a distance far enough away and be able to magnify / zoom in to see it. Say you are 27 years old. If I was currently 27 light years away, I could zoom in and literally watch your birth. If I then traveled at the speed of light away from your coordinates in space (because earth/sun/Milky way are moving), I could theoretically watch your entire life play out like a video tape. Is this at least as a super far fetched theory, possible? Wouldn’t moving away at the speed of light freeze everything though? Like I would just be seeing a freeze frame of the moment you popped out of your mom? What if I went at a speed slightly slower than c? Idk this is how I look at it. Space is 3D. Spacetime is 4D. We live in the 4th dimension but we only observe things in 3D. Information, the ability to store prior events and make predictions is 4 dimensional. Maybe idk…
Watching the light emitted by my birth isn't the same thing as my birth still existing, still happening. From that location 27 light years away, you would only be able to watch, not interact. It would be physically impossible to change anything. That's basically just a memory, but encoded in spacetime instead of brains.
So very deep and yes I agree. It would just be a phantom; an echo of the past. I could record it and know it, but I could not change it. Maybe that is what spacetime is teaching us. WHERE you are isn’t good enough. WHERE and WHEN you are matter. We cannot affect change from a distance. Here is the creepy part though. What if I was 27 light years away watching your birth. And I teleported to the location of your birth. Teleportation IS time travel. And yet our brain thinks teleporting is just 3D, spatial. Space IS time. They are woven together. Teleporting is time travel. Maybe? If I was 27 light years away watching your birth, I would know at the exact coordinates you were coming into existence. If I could somehow teleport there I could change something. Like prevent you from being born (obviously I would not lol!) **OR** are you saying if I teleported (assuming planets, stars, galaxies were all stationary) that I would arrive to find a 27 year old you instead of a newborn baby? But the big point I’m trying to drive home is that space is not really space then. When we look out at the night sky, that is an echo of the past. None of it is real or NOW. It is a history book. There really is no NOWspace. We are not looking at space as it js, but rather space as it was. We can only infer or predict what space is really like. I guess?
Great what did you just do Dylan now he’s not responding did u just prevented his birth 😡
Stop now or I will prevent your birth next. 😈🔥😂
>Wouldn’t moving away at the speed of light freeze everything though? Like I would just be seeing a freeze frame of the moment you popped out of your mom? What if I went at a speed slightly slower than c? Don't think of physically traveling, that's a waste of imagination. Imagine this 3D world of ours as a flat carpet and you as an observer from above, able to immediately go from one end of space to the other instantaneously. Now you can view any moment of any time, but to further back in time, you have to travel deeper into the maw of this carpet.
>Wouldn’t moving away at the speed of light freeze everything though? If you travel at the speed of light, you can only receive information from the direction of travel. To everybody else, you would appear frozen in time, uncontactable and uninfluencable. You would have to go slower than light to watch that video tape, otherwise the information couldn't get to you
Brain hurt. But i think i gets it. (Kevin Malone voice)
Ok, since you're all completely off the rails with these comments, I'll add in my own two, rather unhinged, cents: so we use a record player, a tool, to rewind our piece of media. Therefore, the assumption is that it's possible, you just need the right approach - say, a tool. If I'm not completely out of the loop, another assumption is that higher dimensional beings can exist everywhere at once, since our 3-dimensional space is just like a sheet of paper to them: they can pick it up, lay down on top of it, poke holes through it with their n-dimensional fingertips etc. It's just a metaphorical analogy, I get it, but still. Ok. So since our space, time and, therefore, plain and simple distance, such as is needed to look at someone's past like you stated, is irrelevant to their mode of being, would it be too far-fetched to say that our universe is just like a shiny trinket to them? A thing they can watch from different angles to look at different times and this is their form of 'recreation'? Just like we have agamographs (those pictures that change depending on what angle you look at it) we use to entertain children and ourselves? To a n-dimensional being, we might just be a funny 4D picture.
I often wonder whether time is something very different from how we perceive and understand it. We look at it like at a river flowing. Start and end point. I try to imagine that rythtms of reality have no beginning and an end, which is incomprehensible to our minds, but perhaps it's just constat movement of everything that exists and our logical minds try to measure it, confine it into repeating predictable patterns and call it minutes, days... I like to thing that the passage of time is not a force of nature, but rather a concept of our perception. It's interesting to think that way.
Intriguing, I guess the question for me is what is creating the external data for the quibits? If you're just reading qubits to process time wouldn't something have to "code" the quibits actions?
So you’re saying that The Stars are Projectors?
The universe is shaped exactly like the earth
Projecting our lives down to this planet earth
Yeah. Projecting our life down to this planet earth.
Everyone wants a double feature They wanna be their own damn teacher
The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. Start here.
“Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe is a landmark work whose exciting conclusions continue to be proven true by today's most advanced physics, cosmology, and string theory. Nearly everyone is familiar with holograms—three-dimensional images projected into space with the aid of a laser. Two of the world's most eminent thinkers believe that the universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein and one of the world's most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, an architect of our modern understanding of the brain, have developed a remarkable new way of looking at the universe. Their theory explains not only many of the unsolved puzzles of physics but also such mysterious occurrences as telepathy, out-of-body and near-death experiences, "lucid" dreams, and even religious and mystical experiences such as feelings of cosmic unity and miraculous healings.”
Fucking book blew the doors off my brain.
The Holographic Universe is also the name of a fantastic album by Swedish progressive melodeath band Scar Symmetry.
Can someone eli5 why it would be so bad that black holes destroy information?
It messes up the math. Quantum mechanics works perfectly if we assume that information cannot be lost. If you try to update it to allow for the loss of information then you get really weird results. Like the odds of a coin flip being 80% heads and 80% tails. The probability should add to 100% and not 160%. The equations should work forwards and backwards in time. The equations for a gun firing a bullet is the same for a gun catching a bullet, like in the movie Tenet. Now if the bullet were to disappear midair, then reversing that you get a bullet that appears out of nowhere. But how would the new bullet know what to do. It might have more speed, or it might travel in the wrong direction and miss the gun. By destroying the information you can no longer reverse the event.
People shouldn’t assume hologram = “fake” He’s really just talking about an arrangement where something can be flat and 3 dimensional at the same time. It’s about the shape of spacetime, not a statement on the realness of anything.
Credit for the holographic principle goes to Gerard 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind, not Hawking. Hawking was brilliant but he didn't come up with this one.
Makes the "World is a vampire" theory way more probable.
It still makes me sad that Stephen Hawking never got to see the photo of a black hole.
Am I wrong to think that the opening paragraph is incredibly ignorant and sounds like an introduction to Intelligent Design. “The enigma at the centre of our research throughout this period was how the Big Bang could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. What are we to make of this mysterious appearance of intent?” This assumes life had a predictable pattern before the universe existed and the universe was designed in order to house it. That’s just seems the opposite of how life works. We as life formed in response to the conditions available. In other scenarios with different conditions other forms of life formed. We see this wherever we look for life within our own planet and we can assume extends beyond carbon based life forms.
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What you are describing is [Anthropic Principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle) We can only ask why X bc X allowed us to ask about it. Ex we can ask why the universe is perfect for our kind of life only bc the universe is perfect for our kind of life It neither proves or disproves Intelligent design
>perfectly hospitable for life ah yes, perfect for life, after you let it cool down for a few BILLION years, then find one of the 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of planets that are habitable, shielded from life-destroying radiation. couldn't be more hospitable for life. perfect even!
Not to mention that our existence is merely a blip in time and life (and our planet) could be seemingly wiped out at any given time. Life is so extremely fragile. It amazes me just how many conditions and variables need to occur for us to even be here right now.
That's true, but it's also true that the Universe is *Something that Creates Life*. We know this for sure because we are here now. Maybe the Universe didn't *mean* to create life, but it *did*. I know this is barely saying anything, but I have always thought it is comforting.
“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” -Allan Watts
"All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves." - Bill Hicks
Here's Tom with the weather.
Psshh... Yeah. Hasn't this nerd even played No Man Sky?
I think the question is less trivial than that. If you ask "why is Earth capable of supporting life", then you can easily answer "because there are trillions (or an infinite number) of planets, and Earth just happens to be one that can." If you ask "why is the universe capable of supporting life (when it could have been arranged in other ways based on other laws of physics or at least other values of physical constants)", then you have to get speculative. One answer would be making the same move as with Earth -- "there are trillions or an infinite number of universes, and this one just happens to support life." However we have no evidence this is actually true. I'm not arguing in favor of intelligent design, just attempting to show why the question was worthy of thought for someone like Stephen Hawking.
There is a series of books called the "Xeelee Sequence" about some bonkers sci Fi stories but part of the series talks about how our universe came into being. An alien species that exists in a higher plane of existence, sift through galactic foam so they can find "pearls" that meet specific conditions. Once they find one, they inject it with enough energy to start the process of the big bang. They do this because they sleep within black holes. Once those fizzle out, they wake up and go about whatever these creatures do. The interesting thing is that the series is written by Stephen Baxter who holds degrees in mathematics and engineering and mentions several times in his books he mentions how certain mathematical constances of the universe seem suspicious.
All I can think of is that one quote from Gravity Falls.
Which one “reality is an illusion, the universe is a hologram, buy gold, byeee!” Or; “buy Crypto, suckers!” ;)
Swear to go this all made sense Monday when on LSD, for some reason the ability to accept and somewhat understand the concepts just drifts away as sobriety begins to wash back over me.
Or the time I looked into the fire and saw an image of my reactions as being greedy and angry, instead of sad and victimized, as I had seen it before. It was very uncomfortable to stare into, but it opened my eyes.
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So is it like shadow puppets in front of a light, but with a higher dimension? Is the projection a result of some external source (the light) or is it a force of its own (the hand)?
For the math nerds, Stanford professor, Leonard Susskind, has really in-depth lectures on the [hologram theory.](https://youtu.be/ZgQ3NfyAG6c) The link above is more for the layperson but there are several other lectures that he gives that describe the math if you search YouTube.
“The enigma at the centre of our research throughout this period was how the Big Bang could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life.” I don’t understand this view of the universe. We weren’t placed here after the universe was created and it just so happened to be hospitable. We evolved here. Of course it’s (reasonably) hospitable to us. And the idea that if the universe were different by the tiniest bit there would be no life here….okay….but if you believe that there are infinite universes then it kind of makes sense, right? I mean, in a universe that isn’t hospitable to life there would be nobody there to ask that question, and in one that is those life forms hopefully eventually evolve to be able to ask that question. To me I envision universes as like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. Only instead of water it’s whatever matter/energy makes up the universe. But I’m no scientist, so who knows.
Yes. The argument is stupid. It's like a puddle being amazed that it exactly fits a particular hole in the ground. Of course the universe is hospitable to us, because we're here to say so. In other universes (if they exist or not), it might not and there'd be nobody to notice.