Elsewhere
May 16

Wired interviews physicist Brian Greene about discovering and traveling to parallel and multiple universes, teleportation, and whether or not you and I — and everything around us — aren’t essentially just holographic projections.

…over the course of many years, they developed an idea that when an object falls into a black hole, yes indeed, it falls in, but a copy of all of its information content gets in some sense “smeared out” on the surface of the black hole, on the horizon of the black hole. Smeared out in some sense like a series of 0’s and 1’s, the way information is stored in a typical computer. And that idea would suggest that a three-dimensional object inside the black hole can be described by information on a two-dimensional surface that surrounds the black hole.

And it was a few years ago that string theory — the field that I work on — gave really strong evidence to many of us that this idea really might be correct. Now, the reason why that’s particularly interesting is because the space inside a black hole is not really fundamentally different — it isn’t governed by different laws than space outside a black hole, or space anywhere else, for that matter. So if we learn, as we seem to have, that a 3-D object inside a black hole can be described by 2-D information on a surface that surrounds it, that lesson should be quite general. Which means that 3-D objects, even the ones that we’re familiar with — you and me and everything around us — these 3-D objects may indeed be describable by information on a 2-D surface that surrounds us, a surface that in some sense is at the edge of the universe. Now, this starts to sound like a hologram; a hologram is a thin 2-D piece of plastic which, when illuminated correctly, yields a realistic three-dimensional image. The idea is we may be that three-dimensional image of this more fundamental information on the 2-D surface that surrounds us.