The hologram really is a metaphor. Chown writes his article that way because the Hologram is something we can relate to and it attracts more interest than the same old local vs. non-local reality. If you read many of the comments appearing after the article
World May Be a Hologram you will see that most of the commetators do -- get it. This is just proof of the same old issue: Local reality or Non-local reality. Pretty much everyone agrees on the non-local part, but very often the scientists fail to expand philisophically on what the consequences of "non-locality" actually are.
Granularity (grainy reality) is nothing more than a natural consequence for non-locality. If locality were actually true then the universe would have to be infinite, i.e. … recall the corny anecdote about Einstein, the physicist, arguing with, Pythagoras, the mathematician at a highschool dance party. Pythagaras insists that if he walks half way over to a very cute girl on the other side of the ballroom, and then half way again, and repeats this process for an infinite number of times, he will never reach her. Meanwhile the Einstein is already more than half way across the ballroom, turns back to the mathematician and says, "Yah, but I can get close enough."
Instead of the infinite universe, we simply find that where light speed has no meaning (i.e the planck length - planck time -- light cones and so forth) we find ourselves simply outside of the observable universe and you simply cannot fine tune your measuring device any better because your measuring device by definition must exist (in his reality).
Thus the man who leaves his wife and kids behind to get into an experimental light speed rocket ship and travels for what seems like a few seconds at the speed of light; he comes back to earth only to find that he is now the only living Great, Great, Great, Great Grampa. Time moved more slowly for him.
Yet, isn't it another conundrum? Even if we use the Lorentz transformation equations, things still don't always work out. We saw the man get on his light speed ship and saw the ship take off. Did we not see the flash of light as he speed off into the night? Did not our great, great … grand children see the flash of light as he returned back to his home planet? To the spectators, those flashes of light would happen almost instantaneously (after all light travels very-very fast). How then could that same flash of light take so long to happen for him in relation to us? And what if he went faster than light, would he return younger than when he left?
We consider Schrödinger’s Cat (that is the imaginary diabolical experiment where the investigator puts a cat in a box with no means of observation and then sets a device in the same box whereby depending upon whether or not a radioactive isotope decays will determine if and when the cat gets blown to bits). Some would interpret the experiment to mean that while the box is closed, the system simultaneously exists in a superposition of the states "decayed nucleus/dead cat" and "undecayed nucleus/living cat", and that only when the box is opened and an observation performed does the wave function collapse into one of the two states. More intuitively, some feel that the "observation" is taken when a particle from the nucleus hits the detector. Recent developments in quantum physics show that measurements of quantum phenomena taken by non-conscious "observers" (such as a wiretap) most definitely alter the quantum state of the phenomena from the point of view of conscious observers reading the wiretap, lending support to this idea.
In the end, the idea of the Hologram merely states what everyone pretty much already agrees on -- non-locality. This reality is a projection. That doesn't mean any more or any less than what it says. Don't go dreaming that the planets aren't really there, that your wife is just a machine, or that you are living in some form or another of the
Truman Show.
This is your reality ... and it is mine to the extent that our "vibrations" coincide on this web forum space. Oh! and these are not the first
anomalous readings we gotten out of our gravity measuring devices. ed
Just accept it. Jim is correct - The Universe Solved!
Our World May be a HologramOur World may be a Hologram