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Yesterday, I was reminded of the holographic principle. Bekenstein's 2003 Scientific American article is (obviously) a better introduction to the concept then the wikipedia article. Excerpts from the SciAm article:
Today, I watched a short video of a deep space "picture" of our galaxy taken over 7 days by the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile (with its bus-sized 3.2 giga-pixel camera) and which hides millions of galaxies behind that picture (and that is just a small swath of the universe seen from out pale blue dot and which the observatory will attempt to image in the order of billion of galaxies over time and still only 1% to 10% of the total).
Either the Creator is really shy about about revealing his creation (given all our sophomoric attempts at capturing his opus thus far in his/her many direct contacts with earthlings) and/or the Universe is just so vast and complex, that no human storytelling can ever begin to capture its richness, ever.
I am a bit curious though about how the major (extant) religions will explain the existence of sentient alien life when the evidence will become undeniable (if humanity manages to survive our first contact and the AI singularity).
Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.
How much information does it take to describe a whole universe? Could that description fit in a computer’s memory? Could we, as William Blake memorably penned, “see the world in a grain of sand,” or is that idea no more than poetic license?
Related results suggest that our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial dimen- sions, might instead be “written” on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram.
OUR INNATE PERCEPTION that the world is three-dimensional could be an extraordinary illusion.
Holography may be a guide to a better theory. What is the fundamental theory like? The chain of reasoning involving holography suggests to some, notably Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for The- oretical Physics in Waterloo, that such a fi- nal theory must be concerned not with fields, not even with spacetime, but rather with information exchange among physi- cal processes. If so, the vision of informa- tion as the stuff the world is made of will have found a worthy embodiment.
Today, I watched a short video of a deep space "picture" of our galaxy taken over 7 days by the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile (with its bus-sized 3.2 giga-pixel camera) and which hides millions of galaxies behind that picture (and that is just a small swath of the universe seen from out pale blue dot and which the observatory will attempt to image in the order of billion of galaxies over time and still only 1% to 10% of the total).
Either the Creator is really shy about about revealing his creation (given all our sophomoric attempts at capturing his opus thus far in his/her many direct contacts with earthlings) and/or the Universe is just so vast and complex, that no human storytelling can ever begin to capture its richness, ever.
I am a bit curious though about how the major (extant) religions will explain the existence of sentient alien life when the evidence will become undeniable (if humanity manages to survive our first contact and the AI singularity).
