Embracing Your Fifth DimensionWhat does it mean to live in a...
Embracing Your Fifth Dimension
What does it mean to live in a holographic universe?
By Sabine Hossenfelder in Medium
Image credit: TU Wien.
Good article to understand the concept of duality and the holographic principle in theoretical physics, both of them essential in modern physics and that are very amenable to fall in science fiction and pseudoscience, but that actually mean something very specific (and conceptually and mathematically sophisticated) that has little to do with the tales that are read often out there on the subject.
Also in the blog of the author she gives a bonus-track relating to Stephen Hawking’s recent proposal for information recovery from black holes:
5. Does this have something to do with Stephen Hawking’s recent proposal for how to solve the black hole information loss problem?
That’s what he says, yes. Essentially he is claiming that our universe has holographic properties even though it has a positive cosmological constant, and that the horizon of a black hole also serves as a surface that contains all the information of what happens in the full space-time. This would mean in particular that the horizon of a black hole keeps track of what fell into the black hole, and so nothing is really forever lost.
This by itself isn’t a new idea. What is new in this work with Malcom Perry and Andrew Strominger is that they claim to have a way to store and release the information, in a dynamical situation. Details of how this is supposed to work however are so far not clear. By and large the scientific community has reacted with much skepticism, not to mention annoyance over the announcement of an immature idea.
More advanced but very interesting is this paper of Joseph Polchinski: