Hogan Hears a Who?

Here's another article regarding the holographic principle, and Craig Hogan's (crazy?) idea.  I prefer this article to the last, as it raises more of the issues with such a hypothesis.  From Science News' Website:

The Grinch detested the noise created by the tiny residents of Whoville. Cosmologist Craig Hogan, in contrast, has become enamored of a noise he claims is generated by something even tinier — a minuscule graininess in the otherwise smooth structure of spacetime.

Courtesy of C. Hogan, illustration by T. Dube

Call it Hogan’s noise. Many physicists are skeptical, but if his hunch about the existence of this subatomic clatter proves correct, it could have a mind-boggling implication: that the entire universe is nothing more than a giant hologram.

What’s more, it would mean that the structure of spacetime on subatomic scales might soon be revealed. “What’s new is that we can make a prediction and design an experiment to measure something on the tiniest of scales in the universe, and that’s what hasn’t been done before,” says Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Ill., and a researcher at the University of Chicago.

In fact, it’s just possible that a detector in Hannover, Germany, built for an entirely different study, may have already recorded the noise generated by the smallest units of spacetime in the universe.

But Hogan’s model would go even deeper than that. It could lead to a major revision in how scientists think about spacetime, says theorist Bernard Schutz, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. Hogan’s hypothesis suggests that information encoded on a tiny piece of spacetime could somehow influence the amount of information available to an observer from a region far, far away — violating a principle of physics known as locality. Rejecting locality would have major implications for attempts to knit together the quantum world — the subatomic realm — with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which deals with gravity and the structure of spacetime on the very largest cosmic scales.

In most models that try to apply quantum theory to spacetime, the universe is indeed grainy, Schutz notes. But that graininess is usually the same everywhere in the cosmos. In contrast, Hogan’s model suggests the graininess isn’t uniform. It gets amplified the farther an observer resides from grains in a remote region of spacetime. That concept “would be a major revolution” in quantum gravity research, Schutz says.

Read the Full Article, by Ron Cowen, at Science News.