Just something to think about on this chilly and wet Friday!
Is It All Just An Illusion?
Photo credit: Falcorian/Wikimedia
We think we understand more and more about our universe. But scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are using a laser analysis project called the Holometer to see if we actually live in a hologram. That would mean our 3-D world is merely an illusion, with everything really encoded in tiny 2-D packets.
It would be similar to how TV show characters believe they live in a 3-D world, but they’re trapped on a 2-D screen. Scientists believe the information in our universe may be contained in packets like how the pixels on a TV screen contain data points. When you stand close to your TV, you can see individual pixels. But when you move farther back, all the pixels seem to form one image.
It’s possible that our world is defined that way, with our “pixel” of space equal to an area about 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom. “We want to find out whether space-time is a quantum system just like matter is,” said Craig Hogan of Fermilab. “If we see something, it will completely change ideas about space we’ve used for thousands of years.”
Maybe it will be our world’s Twilight Zone moment.
I have to thank the folks over at Listverse for giving something to mess up my already confused head this morning!
Coffee in the kitchen this morning. Starting to rain some.
