Holographic Universe: Hossenfelder says no (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 27, 2021, 20:54 (1335 days ago) @ BBella

String theorists keep trying to use it:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/03/is-universe-really-hologram.html

"In science fiction movies, holograms are 3-dimensional, moving images. But in reality, the technology for motion holograms hasn’t caught up with imagination. At least so far, holograms are still mostly stills.

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"Real holograms actually encode a three-dimensional object on a flat surface. How is this possible? The answer is interference.

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"When string theorists claim that our universe is a hologram, they mean the following. Our universe has a positive cosmological constant. But mathematically, universes with a negative cosmological constant are much easier to work with. So, this is what string theorists usually look at. These universes with a negative cosmological constant are called Anti-de Sitter spaces and into these Anti-de Sitter things they put supersymmetric matter. To best current knowledge, our universe is not Anti De Sitter and matter is not supersymmetric, but mathematically, you can certain do that.

"For some specific examples, it has then been shown that the gravitational theory in such an Anti de Sitter universe is mathematically equivalent to a different theory on the conformal boundary of that universe. What the heck is the conformal boundary of the universe? Well, our actual universe doesn’t have one. But these Anti-De Sitter spaces do. Just exactly how they are defined isn’t all that important. You only need to know that this conformal boundary has one dimension of space less than the space it is a boundary of.

"So, you have an equivalence between two theories in a different number of dimensions of space. A gravitational theory in this anti-De Sitter space with the weird matter. And a different theory on the boundary of that space, which also has weird matter. And just so you have heard the name: The theory on the boundary is what’s called a conformal field theory, and the whole thing is known as the Anti-de Sitter – Conformal Field Theory duality, or AdS/CFT for short.

"This duality has been mathematically confirmed for some specific cases, but pretty much all string theorists seem to believe it is much more generally valid. In fact, a lot of them seem believe it is valid even in our universe, even though there is no evidence for that, neither observational nor mathematical. In this most general form, the duality is simply called the “holographic principle'”.

Comment: We move around in three dimensions, so we are not in a hologram, but from what \Hossenfelder tells us the string theorists live in la-la mathematical worlds and need to be ignored, just as Smolin and Woit have told us.