GEO600 is a large gravitational wave detector located in Hanover, Germany.  Designed to be extremely sensitive to fluctuations in gravity, its purpose is to detect gravitational waves from distant cosmic events.  Recently, however, it has been plagued by inexplicable noise or graininess in its measurement results (see article in New Scientist).  Craig Hogan, director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, thinks that the instrument has reached the limits of spacetime resolution and that this might be proof that we live in a hologram.  Using physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft’s theory that our 3D reality may be a projection of processes encoded on the 2D surface of the boundary of the universe, he points out that, like a common hologram, the graininess of our projection may be at much larger scales than the Planck length (10-35 meters), such as 10-16 meters.

Crazy?  Is it any stranger than living in 10 spatial dimensions, living in a space of parallel realities, invisible dark matter all around us, reality that doesn't exist unless observed, or any of a number of other mind-bending theories that most physicists believe?  In fact, as fans of this website are well aware, such experimental results are no surprise.  Just take a look at the limits of resolution in my Powers of 10 simulation in the Programmed Reality level: Powers of 10.  I arbitrarily picked 10-21 meters, but it could really be any scale where it happens.

If our universe is programmed, however, it is probably done in such a way as to be unobservable for the most part.  Tantalizing clues like GEO600 noise give us all something to speculate about.  But don't be surprised if the effect goes away when the programmers apply a patch to improve the reality resolution for another few years.  

Thanks to my photogenic cat, Scully, for providing an example of grainy reality...

Tags: gravity waves, hologram, holographic universe, programmed reality, spacetime resolution
Categories: AI | Cosmology | Programmed Reality | Quantum Mechanics