Is Our Universe Simply a Projection of Another Cosmos?

A new research theory claims that we could simply live in a projection of another cosmos. How is that possible? By holographic principle, gravity comes from thin, vibrating strings. These strings are holograms of events which exist in a flatter cosmos. According to this theory, everything we experience can be assumed as events occurring in this flatter location. This is the first time the validity of the model has been mathematically tested.

The universe is a hologram and everything you can see is just a projection. This is the fact according to a controversial model proposed in 1997 by physicist Juan Maldacena. Until now the theory had never been tested. However, recent mathematical models suggest that this principle could be accurate.

The holographic principle is a characteristic of quantum gravity and string theories. It states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region. The theory is first proposed by Gerard’t Hooft and its precise string-theory interpretation is given by Leonard Susskind. By this observation, the string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in a holographic way.

In a larger scale, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be viewed as a 2-D information structure “painted” on the cosmological horizon, such that the 3-D we observe are only an effective description at macroscopic scales. In general, cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, because the cosmological horizon has a finite area and grows with time.

The holographic principle is inspired by black hole thermodynamics. This implies that the maximal entropy in any region increases with the radius squared. In such a case, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole can be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. This principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the support of string theory.

In his paper presented at the arXiv repository, a Japanese scientist Yoshifumi Hyakutake calculated the internal energy of a black hole in order to try to provide mathematical evidence for the holographic principle. He explored the boundaries of a specific black hole as well as the effects of ‘virtual particles’ which is a type of particle that is believed to continuously pop in and out of existence. In a separate paper, Professor Hyakutake calculated the energy contained inside of the alternate flatter cosmos with no gravity. Surprisingly, the computer calculations of the theoretical universe and the black hole’s boundaries matched. Some believe this is ‘compelling’ evidence of the dual nature of the universe.

Professor Maldacena reported that this fact provides hope that the gravitational properties of our universe can someday be explained by quantum theory.