This article was taken from the January 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Scientists at Chicago's Fermilab believe our universe could be a hologram -- and they've built what they claim is "the world's most precise instrument" in an attempt to prove it. The instrument, known as the Holometer, uses lasers to detect the movement of particles by the tiniest of margins: a billionth of a billionth of a metre, almost a billion times smaller than an atom. The particle's position will help test the scientists' theory. "The idea derives from the discovery that when anything is sucked into a black hole all the information for that 3D object is encoded across the black hole's two-dimensional surface," explains Aaron Chou, lead scientist and designer of the Holometer experiment. "Unlike a photo, which loses much of the 3D information, a black hole manages to encode all of it in 2D form."
The holographic model proposes that this is the case everywhere -- that our apparently 3D Universe is fundamentally flat. If the theory is correct, Chou explains, then it also predicts that the Universe is made up of "tiny two-dimensional bits, like the pixels of a digital image". An understanding of how a full 3D universe could be encoded in tiny two-dimensional pixels could have far-reaching consequences far beyond the speculations of theoretical physicists. "Certain computations of three-dimensional objects can be more easily calculated with two-dimensional encoding," says Chou. "If our research bears fruit, we might come up with new paradigms for computing, for more efficient encoding of information and more powerful algorithms."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
