Perhaps the World Is Flat After All
Of the many cool ideas to come out of Star Trek, one of the coolest is the holodeck, a “room” described as a “staging environment in which participants may engage with different virtual reality environments.” It can be used for research or play. Captain Picard, for example, programmed it so he could become one of his boyhood heroes, fictional detective Dixon Hill, in “The Big Goodbye.” On/in the holodeck, “objects and people are simulated by a combination of matter, beams, and fields onto which holographic images are projected.” These things appear solid, i.e., real, until the user terminates the program, except in cases where assorted villainies or glitches add difficulty and the prerequisite drama.
Suffice it to say that the process allows you to capture and project a three-dimensional image of a holographed subject. CNN made a big deal out of this a while ago when a hologram of a reporter, rather than the reporter herself, appeared in the studio to do her story. Holomans [human holographs] also show up often in science fiction, where they work much better, naturally, than in real life. Perhaps the most famous one is the hologramized Princess Leia, who appears, courtesy of R2D2, to make her plea for help to Luke and Obi-wan.
So why all the much-ado about holograms? Because we — you, me, everything you see around you, everything everywhere on earth and beyond — may be one. This according to Joseph Stromberg, who writes “Some physicists believe we’re living in a giant hologram — and it’s not that farfetched.” Joe tells us that “even though we appear to live in a three-dimensional universe, it might only have two dimensions.” To try to put this as simply as possible, the holographic principle posits that all existing things can be viewed as information, like data on a thumb drive, and that physical information can be altered but never destroyed. Stromberg explains it this way:
As an analogy, think of a stack of documents that are fed into a shredder. Even though they’re cut into tiny pieces, the information present on the pieces of paper still exists. It’s been cut into tiny pieces, but it hasn’t disappeared, and given enough time, the documents could be reassembled so that you’d know what was written on them originally. In essence, the same thing was thought to be true with particles.
As the story goes, when things wander into a black hole, they get pulverized but at the same time leave a 2D imprint encoded on the event horizon, the terminal boundary around black holes. Outside of it, you might escape the gravity; inside it, you’re toast. Once the 2D information is recorded on this gi-galactic CD-ROM, outgoing radiation picks it up and “projects” it as three-dimensional. The holographic principle came into being because the idea of a two-dimensional universe solves some annoying theoretical questions physicists have been losing sleep over for quite some time.
What should all this mean to you? Should you think of, say, flatbread and ironing with much greater appreciation? Naw. Joe reassures us that “the same laws of physics you’ve been living with your entire life would seem to remain exactly the same. Your house, dog, car, and body would keep appearing as three-dimensional objects, just as they always have.”
In some ways, this is disappointing. So much for the losing-weight mania being a thing of the past because our real personal dimensions are more like those of cardboard cutout figures or bumper stickers than what that no-good-must-be-lying mirror tells us.
On the other hand, this knowledge comes as a great relief. If true, I can finally put to rest my irrational fear of being sucked into a singularity and having my atoms ripped mercilessly asunder, which has generated spacemares ever since my viewing of The Black Hole. Been there, done that, and, you know, it’s turned out much better than I thought it would.
Image: Star Trek holodeck. Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=789586.
