Astronomical by Tim James

Author:Tim James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

The Universe Is Saved, But It Might Be a Hologram

Imagine a hypothetical cube made entirely of electrons. Such an object would be hard to make, but humour me for a moment. The six walls of this cube are made of negatively charged particles skittering around the surface. Now imagine firing another electron into the box from the outside. Because that electron is also negatively charged, when it pierces the wall of the box it will change the positions of all the surface electrons. Those disturbances in the surface are measurable and if we look closely we could deduce all the information we wanted to about the box’s interior.

In fact, we never need to study the internal electron directly because we can observe how the surface of the box behaves. We could calculate how long ago the electron entered, how fast it was going, where it entered and even deduce its current location inside.

It would be like analysing the ripples of a swimming pool to figure out how long ago someone jumped in and where they were swimming under the water. In practice, it would not be easy, but in theory the 2D outer layer would tell us everything we needed to know about the 3D interior.

Maldacena and Susskind showed that this principle of working out higher-dimensional information from lower dimensional surroundings could be applied to information. If this is true, then the information of any 3D space might be subtly encoded in the 2D boundary encasing it.

When an object falls into a black hole, the 3D information (the particle) goes in while the 2D information (the particle’s surroundings) stays outside, later to be carried away by the Hawking radiation. I can’t think of a way to sum this up in a neat little diagram, so instead here is a sketch I made of an onion, which will probably confuse anyone skimming through the book.

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