July 12, 2008
the holographic principle, crazy like a fox
In a packed lecture hall at Columbia University in 1958 -- or so the story goes -- the eminent physicist Wolfgang Pauli was presenting a radical new theory. In the audience was Niels Bohr, another eminent physicist, who, at lecture's end, stood up and announced: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.""Crazy enough" is no doubt a thought that occurred to Stanford theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind when he came up with his holographic principle -- an idea that has recently gained traction in the physics community. The principle, which states that our universe is a three-dimensional projection of information stored in two dimensions at the boundary of space, certainly ranks as crazy. But is it crazy enough?
After reading Susskind's entertaining new book, "The Black Hole War," you may decide that, yes, the holographic principle may well be on the good side of crazy. But before he gets to the holographic principle, Susskind gives an explanation, both lucid and enjoyable, of why black holes are so crucial to the future of physics and to any eventual reconciliation of relativity and quantum mechanics.
more from the LA Times here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 12:54 PM | Permalink
Comments
I got a heads-up on this stuff from Pervez Hoodbhoy a while back when I visited him during a summer he was spending at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He sat me down in his office (in response to a question from me about information-theoretic physics) and stood at the blackboard writing down stuff and giving me a great lecture for an hour or so. (He also bought me lunch. Nice guy.) Later he sent me some of Susskind's papers, the math in which was too advanced for me, but which still made a weird kind of sense to me. I'll now read Susskind's book for sure. Thanks much for this post.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jul 12, 2008 1:28:17 PM
Nicely written review. And my local library even has a copy.
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 13, 2008 1:37:02 PM
Susskind's Black Hole War is one of the best expositions of certain elements of physics I've ever read. I started in the middle and read it right through to the middle again. Fascinating, apart from one or two meandering anecdotes, which he's entitled to. You should also see his introductory lectures on YouTube. Susskind is the sort of great teacher I wish I'd had 60 years ago.
Posted by: woccam28 | Jul 21, 2008 2:48:34 PM
There was quite a waiting list for this book, but I finally got it last week. It was one of those can't put down sort of books.
Definitely a good read. He does a very nice job through creative analogies of putting his arguments across so that they are comprehensible to the general public. Best cosmic-trivia factiod: Out of every 10,000,000,000 bits of information in the observable universe, 9,999,999,999 of them are associated with the event horizons of black holes. The remaining physical universe that we can see is a mere .00000001% of the total mass. He doesn't mention Dark Matter at all (is he counting its mass?), though he acknowledges the rebirth of Einstein's long discarded cosmological constant in its current incarnation of the Dark Energy that drives the expanding universe (relative to us, things more than 15 billion light years away are receeding from us at more than the speed of light, and are therefore unknowable to us, exactly as if they had entered a cosmic event horizon surrounding us; a sort of reversed black hole). Throughout, he insists on the existence of Gravitons, which annoys me somehow, but what do I know.
I'll admit the Holographic Principle he puts forth is way over the top, as it seems to state that even the remaining .00000001% is not actually there (yes, that includes us), but is actually encoded at a vast remove on a n-dimensions less one boundary layer (you pick the number of dimensions, the math works regardless). Does he believe it? Or is it all just mathematical prestidigitation? Dunno, but it is fascinating all the same.
Somewhere down the line, I'm sure it will all translate to a smarter phone or something.
Posted by: Carlos | Dec 13, 2008 10:55:03 PM
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