Holographic Universe

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noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Mr. Tea said:
With talk of "participatory observer-created reality", I think a most scientists these days would inwardly cringe and start muttering darkly about the Copenhagen Interpretation and the anthropic principle...
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Well that's OK because you can forget about those terms for the purposes of thinking about that article. The important part is the connectivity. What I'm getting at is you touch this thing here and affect that thing there because they are in fact the same thing.
Mr. Tea said:
Ahh, right. Yeah, teleportation is a bit different. As far as I know, there is no hypothetical process that can transmit actual, usable information superluminally currently accepted by the mainstream of the theoretical physics community.
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I'll have to read a bit more to get an idea of what the current thinking is exactly but again this is almost the point - there need be no 'transmission' of 'information' because everything is interconnected.

Anyway, I should be responding to zhao's post directly rather than just picking up on your comments.
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Things already are 'connected' in physics, as long as you're talking about events that have already happened in your past 'light cone':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone

...or events that haven't yet happened in your future light cone.

Events are unconnected to you only if they're happening sufficiently far away that light couldn't reach you from there, or light from you couldn't reach these distant events. (An 'event', in physics, is a four-dimensional coordinate: a time and a place.)

But within light cones, everything that *can* affect something else, *will* affect it.
 
N

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

OK.

djspooky.jpg
distance.jpg


Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

OK.

Wonder,%20Stevie%20-%20Innervisions.jpg


Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

OK!

hitchhiking.jpg
 
N

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

But of course.

art_2_unlimited.jpg
 
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D

droid

Guest
There was a tolerable British sci-fi novel released last year that explored the themes of quantum physics and interconnected alternate realities.

Brasyl Posits Alternate Histories

Multiple-award-winning SF author Ian McDonald, whose novel Brasyl is a finalist for this year's British Science Fiction Association Award, told SCI FI Wire that he wanted to do another book set in a non-Western country as a filter for Western SF notions. His previous novel, River of Gods, was set in India.

"I didn't want anything as obvious as China or Indonesia--they're overserved anyway," McDonald said in an interview. "I was looking for somewhere off the U.S./U.K. radar, and an inner voice one morning in the shower whispered the word 'Brazil,' which is a very beautiful word, laden with exoticism and possibility. I knew next to nothing about Brazil, which is itself a stimulating challenge."

In the novel, McDonald tells three stories set in three histories of Brazil. "The reality-shifting, many-worlds approach seemed to rather suit a country that has always prided itself as 'the nation of the future,'" McDonald said. "It's just that that future seems to be constantly changing, constantly elusive."

McDonald added that it's not clear that the three histories deal with the same nation. "Are they necessarily all the same Brazil?" he said. "For even though one is set in 2032, another in 2006 (or so it seems) and one in 1732, they are all tied together by the wilder implications of quantum theory and quantum computing. Ultimately, it's about what it means to be quantum. And there's the Brazilian dance/martial art of capoeira, what [Americans] call soccer, floating basilicas on the Amazon and sword-fighting Jesuits. And knives that cut down to the quantum level."

Brasyl also explores the wilder shores of quantum theory, McDonald said. "It's one of the most accurate scientific theories we have produced: Its power of prediction is awesome. But for it to be true means everything we assume about physical reality is untrue," he said.

There are three main interpretations of quantum theory, McDonald said. "[There's] the Copenhagen, the Everett Many Worlds and the Bohm Carrier-Wave theory, [and] all of them have profoundly disturbing implications for our place in the universe," he said. "I took the Many Worlds theory, but my writing twist was to take it not as an alternate history, which is how different this alternate world is from ours, but how similar."
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I reckon youd like it Zhao.
 
N

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
I think it (or something very similar) was also used by Klaus Schulze on Sand's 'Golem' album.

I did an image search to get the tastefully censored version of the Roger Waters album sleeve. Interesting what you get if you do a google image search for 'dreams less sweet'.
 
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T

tryptych

waiting for a time
Mr. Tea said:
.

With talk of "participatory observer-created reality", I think a most scientists these days would inwardly cringe and start muttering darkly about the Copenhagen Interpretation and the anthropic principle...
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What do you mean by this? That most scientists don't adhere to the Copenhagen Interpretation? Or that it doesn't require an Observer?


IIRC the way the Copenhagen interpretation gets round the EPR paradox (entanglement) is to say that each observer subjectively collapses the wave function (as wave functions are not "real").

The point about Bohm's interpretation is that it just as consistent as the Copenhagen, or Many-Worlds interpretations. The interesting thing here is that you can see lots of un-scientific reasons why one theory gets chosen over the other - i.e. the feeling that such theories lack "natural-ness" or seem to go against commonsense. I've got a lot of time for Bohm, been reading 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' recently and enjoying it a lot.

Of course, there is another way - do away with time altogether:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19726391.500-is-time-an-illusion.html

I can post this up if anyone's interested, but it is quite long and a bit off topic. It's amusing to see scientists suggesting similar conclusions to those presented over 50 years ago by Husserl & Heidegger.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't think it's unscientific to reject theories on the basis that they seem 'unnatural'. The word here is used in a somewhat specialised sense to describe theories that require a lot of ad-hoc assumptions rather than following 'naturally' from fundamental axioms and postulates. A major reason theories in modern physics and cosmology get rejected is because they require a lot of 'fine-tuning'; that is, they require certain physical parameters to have very specific values rather than predicting those values from ab initio calculations.

This is all related to the anthropic principle, which can be stated as "the universe must be the way it is because otherwise we would not be here to observe it". Most scientists these days find this position unsatisfactory, and would much rather have a theory that says "the universe is the way it is because it could not be any other way". To give an example from cosmology, a major problem with the early form of the big bang theory was that it appeared to require the overall density of the universe to be exactly equal to the critical density (the density that's neither too great to cause an eventual 'big crunch' nor too small to lead to an infinitely expanding universe) in order for the universe to have got this far at all: a density fractionally bigger would have caused a big crunch almost immediately after the big bang, while a fractionally smaller density would have caused the universe to expand much too rapidly for stars and galaxies to form (the so-called 'big freeze').* Then in the '70s a new idea called inflation solved this problem, by postulating an early period of exponential expansion that would have rapidly caused any density greater or smaller than the critical value to rapidly converge to this value.

I mentioned the Copenhagen Interpretation because it seemed to reverse a trend that had been going on in science since the Renaissance, namely that our place in the universe had come to be seen as less and less special or privileged. Specifically, it seemed to require the existence of conscious observers to somehow 'project reality' upon a universe consisting natively of an inchoate miasma of probability waves. Naturally, a lot of physicists were very wary of this idea, and it's not generally taken seriously these days; the problem of wave-function collapse is an ongoing area of research, but most experts in the field take alternative views, based mostly on either an idea called decoherence or some version of the 'many worlds' hypothesis (although, as I understand them, they're more or less equivalent).


*if you want to read up on this it's generally known as the 'flatness problem'.

Edit:

tryptych said:
The point about Bohm's interpretation is that it just as consistent as the Copenhagen, or Many-Worlds interpretations. The interesting thing here is that you can see lots of un-scientific reasons why one theory gets chosen over the other - i.e. the feeling that such theories lack "natural-ness" or seem to go against commonsense. I've got a lot of time for Bohm, been reading 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' recently and enjoying it a lot.
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It may be 'consistent' but as I remarked above it relies on some ad-hoc assumptions - furthermore, no-one has yet been able to use it reproduce quantum field theory, which has been tested experimentally to impressive accuracy. A counter-criticism could be made that Bohm's ideas are not so much an alternative to quantum mechanics per se, but merely a (radically) different interpretation...suffice to say, there are good reasons why most modern researchers in this field work with more 'standard' ideas about quantum mechanics, rather than Bohm's non-local hidden variables.
Also, I've been meaning to read H&TIO for yonks now, it was recommended to me by one of my A-level teachers - hopefully this thread will spur me to get off my arse and find a copy.
 
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T

tryptych

waiting for a time
Mr. Tea said:
I don't think it's unscientific to reject theories on the basis that they seem 'unnatural'. The word here is used in a somewhat specialised sense to describe theories that require a lot of ad-hoc assumptions rather than following 'naturally' from fundamental axioms and postulates. A major reason theories in modern physics and cosmology get rejected is because they require a lot of 'fine-tuning'; that is, they require certain physical parameters to have very specific values rather than predicting those values from ab initio calculations.

This is all related to the anthropic principle, which can be stated as "the universe must be the way it is because otherwise we would not be here to observe it". Most scientists these days find this position unsatisfactory, and would much rather have a theory that says "the universe is the way it is because it could not be any other way". To give an example from cosmology, a major problem with the early form of the big bang theory was that it appeared to require the overall density of the universe to be exactly equal to the critical density (the density that's neither too great to cause an eventual 'big crunch' nor too small to lead to an infinitely expanding universe) in order for the universe to have got this far at all: a density fractionally bigger would have caused a big crunch almost immediately after the big bang, while a fractionally smaller density would have caused the universe to expand much too rapidly for stars and galaxies to form (the so-called 'big freeze').* Then in the '70s a new idea called inflation solved this problem, by postulating an early period of exponential expansion that would have rapidly caused any density greater or smaller than the critical value to rapidly converge to this value.

I mentioned the Copenhagen Interpretation because it seemed to reverse a trend that had been going on in science since the Renaissance, namely that our place in the universe had come to be seen as less and less special or privileged. Specifically, it seemed to require the existence of conscious observers to somehow 'project reality' upon a universe consisting natively of a formless miasma of probability waves. Naturally, a lot of physicists were very wary of this idea, and it's not generally taken seriously these days; the problem of wave-function collapse is an ongoing area of research, but most experts in the field take alternative views, based mostly on either an idea called decoherence or some version of the 'many worlds' hypothesis (although, as I understand them, they're more or less equivalent).


*if you want to read up on this it's generally known as the 'flatness problem'.

Edit:



It may be 'consistent' but as I remarked above it relies on some ad-hoc assumptions - furthermore, no-one has yet been able to use it reproduce quantum field theory, which has been tested experimentally to impressive accuracy. A counter-criticism could be made that Bohm's ideas are not so much an alternative to quantum mechanics per se, but merely a (radically) different interpretation...suffice to say, there are good reasons why most modern researchers in this field work with more 'standard' ideas about quantum mechanics, rather than Bohm's non-local hidden variables.
Also, I've been meaning to read H&TIO for yonks now, it was recommended to me by one of my A-level teachers - hopefully this thread will spur me to get off my arse and find a copy.
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When I say "unscientific" I mean not in a solid, Popperian sense. Working with "standard" ideas, rather than venturing off into radical territory is all well and good, but this is contrary to how I would suggest most working scientists view their discipline - as purely objective slow steps towards ever greater truth. When sociologist of scientific knowledge point our this kind of thing, there tends to be a lot of denial from scientists.

One has to wonder if the reason that Bohm's interpretation has not been able to reproduce quantum field theory is to do with lack of funding, perceived "wrongness" etc.

If you ask me, from a lay point of view, I'd say that physics is close to reaching the stages Kuhn talks about just before a paradigm shift. But I believe we've had this argument about Popper vs Kuhn before so I don't want to re tread old ground.

Could you give a brief description of the decoherence alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation? I was about to say I had a fairly good idea of the many worlds, but after a bit of reading, I realise I don't!

Fascinating - it's amazing the fairly extreme realism and subject-object dualism that is axiomatic to the many worlds interpretation.

Also ironic that many-worlds, in its status as more than in interpretation, but a theory, makes strong metaphysical claims, in the same way in which mysticism is so criticised for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
tryptych said:
One has to wonder if the reason that Bohm's interpretation has not been able to reproduce quantum field theory is to do with lack of funding, perceived "wrongness" etc.
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Or it could just be wrong! Hidden-variables theories certainly have their supporters, and a very noteworthy feature of the field of theoretical physics (and mathematics more generally) is that people working alone on pet theories can (occasionally) make huge insights and achieve amazing advances and breakthroughs: obviously the same cannot be said for large experimental efforts that require lots of manpower and money.

My feeling on this is that Bohm's ideas have not gained a huge amount of mainstream acceptance because of a) the assumptions they require, b) the lack of predictive power, and c) the fact that the predictions they do make seem to be consistent with 'vanilla' quantum mechanics (which manages to make them without needing so many ad-hoc assumptions).

tryptych said:
Could you give a brief description of the decoherence alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation? I was about to say I had a fairly good idea of the many worlds, but after a bit of reading, I realise I don't!
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I'd be delighted to in the morning. Right now my bed is looking like a more tempting proposition.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
polystyle desu said:
How about ... http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/02/qa_turok
?
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I'm pretty sceptical of this kind of cyclical 'brane cosmology'. For one thing, it was apparently thought up because some people found standard Big Bang theory (and a important phase of exponential expansion that happened immediately after, called 'inflation') "contrived" or requiring too many "ad hoc" assumptions. Whereas this new model requires two 'branes' (effectively largely-separate universes) embedded in a higher-dimensional space, interacting with each other only by gravity, and occasionally smashing into each other, releasing energy in a massive explosion that causes an effective big bang. Hmm, not too contrived, then? :slanted:

It's pretty cool that South Africa now has an institute of advanced mathematics, though!
 
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