New experiment at Fermilab focuses on nature of space itself | Hacker News Reader

New experiment at Fermilab focuses on nature of space itself

couriernews.suntimes.com

55 pointsjonbaer9 comments

One of the most incredible things about this sort of project is how many people work on it. This is a beam-splitting laser interferometer so sensitive that it can measure beam jittering in the Planck length range ... yet the size of the main team is about half that of the company that makes Minecraft.

The work these people do is incredible.

The experiment is looking for an effect 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than the Planck length.

That says more about Minecraft

For anyone without a concept of the Minecraft team size: They have 12 coders and 5 artists. With the business and infrastructure teams included, Mojang has 40 people.

Source: https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/331367-empl...

What it would mean to confirm the universe was in fact a hologram, what implications would this have for our physical understanding of the universe, are they any existential implications, like is our existence is actually an illusionary side-effect of some other more <complicated|simple> process?

On a TV screen are pixels, small points of data that make a seamless image if you stand back, they said. Scientists think that the universe’s information may be contained in the same way, and that the natural “pixel size” of space is roughly 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom, a distance that physicists refer to as the Planck scale.

Hmm, I've seen better analogies for holograms, to put it mildly. Pixels on a screen don't convey any sense of self-similarity at multiple scales.

You seem to be thinking of fractals instead of holograms.

What happens when you break a hologram in half?

What happens when you break a TV screen in half?

Looks like a lot of people with voting privileges don't know what a hologram actually is.

Although it is true that you can reconstruct a holographic image with only a piece of a hologram plate, you do lose information. The spatial resolution will get worse and the field of view will be reduced. I don't think you're supposed to lose information when you zoom in on a true fractal.

Anyway, I think the part of the article that you quoted (about the TV pixels) was just explaining the idea that space could turn out to be discrete if you zoom in enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com