What It Means to Live in a Holographic Universe
nautil.us
nautil.us
I find this extremely hard to accept. His simplified example -- a hotel doorman can know the number of people entering and leaving, hence the surface (doorman) can encode information about the volume (hotel) -- does not help. For the doorman/surface to know everything about the volume/hotel, she would require (1) to have been continuously present from the inception of the volume and (2) to have some means or medium of encoding the information about everything that entered or left the volume. Such a recording medium itself has to be error-free and persistent, and it would seem to me must itself have nonzero volume -- which creates an infinite regress of a recording surface on the recording surface of the...
Maybe somebody can clarify?
But for those who are familiar with calculus the notion of holography is related to the mathematical ideas and formulations of Stokes Theorem (and in fact Calculus in total) [0][1]. :)
The holographic principle (iirc) is commonly discussed (in physics) in relation to / in terms of ADS/CFT duality[2]. Where the 'boundary' of some quantum gravity theory (such as formulated by a string theory) on anti-desitter (ADS) space is a conformal field theory which is equivalent to a real world quantum field theory (if in the correct number of dimensions).
As far as I understand it, it allows a way for string theorists to 'map' particular string theories (in a certain dimension) to an actual quantum field theory, using the ADS/CFT duality. In other words, it provides a possible key to doing real world physics with string-theoretic methods.
Some commentary from an actual physicist would be most welcome, though. :)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokes'_theorem [1] https://www.khanacademy.org/math/multivariable-calculus/surf... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence
Here's what comes up in Google:
1. the quality or condition of being dual.
"the novel's deep duality about human motive"
2. an instance of opposition or contrast between two concepts
or two aspects of something; a dualism.
"the photographs capitalize on the dualities of light and
dark, stillness and movement"
That generic kind of duality is well described in the first sentence of [1], and the OP's explanation of a duality as "a connection between two things where the properties of one defines the properties of the other" is pretty obviously an attempt to convey, to a lay audience, that sense of duality.
You seem to be right. I must backtrack and say, "One learns something new everyday!"
When you raise your right hand so does the image. Mirrors flip front and back not left and right.
Well given that physicists agree that you cannot understand quantum mechanic, I would say that this is true for everybody..