From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 10:42:11 MDT
>From the Science & Technology Desk
Published 4/1/2002 5:40 PM
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., April 1 (UPI) -- The basic building blocks of nature
may
not be atoms, quarks and strings but quantum bits -- ultra small packets of
pure
information, top physics researchers say.
"There must be a law of physics that tells us how space-time geometry, and
the
distribution of matter in it, arise from pure, underlying information,"
University of California, Santa Barbara physicist Raphael Bousso told United
Press International.
String theory suggests that one-dimensional strings vibrating in myriad ways
describe space, time and matter. If bits of information tell the strings how
to
vibrate, those bits may be more fundamental than the subatomic strings they
encode.
The Big Bang, which most scientists believe gave birth to matter and
space-time,
may then have more in common with a supercomputer downloading gigabytes of
information than a giant exploding bomb.
"Roughly speaking, the pattern on the sky left over from the Big Bang might
be
pixelated like an image on your computer screen, a sign that it is not a
continuous image," University of Washington astrophysicist Craig Hogan told
UPI
from Seattle. "We can hope for signs of this discreteness in data from the
cosmic microwave background," radiation left over from the moment of
creation.
Information specifies the when, where, why, how and how much of space, time
and
matter. In an equation, a variable that describes information specifies not
only
how much matter, for instance, but when the matter appeared, how it moves and
how it may change and evolve. Information describes everything, and may be
the
variable of choice in the equations of a "theory of everything."
A strong candidate for this theory, Bousso believes, is the so-called
"Holographic Principle," a remarkable discovery by Nobel laureate Gerard
t'Hooft
and Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind that Bousso has championed and
refined.
The Holographic Principle states mathematically a simple yet astounding
detail:
The universe acts like a hologram at a level more fundamental than time and
space -- the level of pure information.
"The holographic principle tells us how much data -- think bits and bytes --
I
need to tell you in complete gory detail every single thing that's going on
in
any region of space," Bousso said. "The theory involves only information."
A hologram is a laser-generated photograph that appears three dimensional. It
contains all the information about a 3-D object in a flat, 2-D region. A
hologram has another remarkable property -- every part contains every bit of
information specified by the whole.
If a hologram of a frog is cut in half, each half shows the entire image of
the
frog. Divide the halves again and the frog remains intact.
Further divisions produce the same intact frog up to a point -- an
indivisible
quantum information "tile" defined by the Holographic Principle. Divide the
hologram into tiles smaller than the so-called "Planck area" -- nearly a
trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of
a
trillionth of a square centimeter -- and the Holographic Principle says you
will
finally lose the original image of the frog.
The Holographic Principle specifies a smallest indivisible unit of
information,
likening bits to photons, the smallest indivisible units of light. It also
says
information comes in tiles that cover an object's surface area rather than
bundles that fill its volume, a much larger region.
All the information about any 3-D object -- all the digital zeroes and ones
needed to fully describe it -- will fit entirely on the 2-D boundary or
surface
of the object, greatly reducing the amount of information physicists will
need
to specify a theory that describes everything.
Somehow, nature can reproduce three dimensions in two, just like a hologram
reproduces a 3-D frog in a 2-D photograph.
Remarkable scientific and philosophical implications spring from the
Holographic
Principle. London physicist David Bohm first suggested the universe might be
a
giant hologram a decade before t'Hooft and Susskind formulated the idea's
first
scientific expression.
Bohm suggested that at some deeper level of reality, everything in the
universe,
including the past, present and future, was infinitely interconnected.
Telepathy, the "sixth sense" hypnosis and dreams merely were ways humans
accessed this information level, which seemed to "tell all."
Bohm's "universal hologram" explained such eternal mysteries as how a divine
creator could be in all places at once, a cinch if -- like the holographic
frog
-- all the information in the vast universe were also contained in a much
smaller, more accessible portion.
Accessing the "Planck-tiled" information floor that may be the foundation of
nature excites physicists such as Raphael Bousso, who have searched for a
theory
that would unite all natural phenomena since James Clerk Maxwell unified
electricity and magnetism in 1873.
"We don't yet know the complete unified theory of everything," Bousso said.
"But
we're ahead in the game because the Holographic Principle tells us how much
data
the world actually contains."
(Reported by Mike Martin in Columbia, Mo.)
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
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