The beauty of our new digital age is the availability of science and knowledge at our fingertips. That's right, with a few clicks of our mouse we can have the answer to most of our science related questions in an instant. But what if a new understanding of our world can come from our digital knowledge?
Well, the US department of Energy and Fermilab say: "Scientists suspect that space and time might be quantized." Michael Moyer of Scientific American further explains that, "Space may not be smooth and continuous. Instead it may be digital, composed of tiny bits." The latest research from Physicist Craig Hogan at the University of Chicago implies that there may be "intimate connections among information, matter and spacetime" that have yet to be explored. Although this is not a new idea, now scientists are developing a new way to test it.
Hogan, who is the director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center in Illinios, believes that he has figured out a way "to detect the bitlike structure of space." Hogan's machine, called the Holometer (holographic interferometer) which is still under construction, will attempt to measure the grainy bit-like nature of space. This machine is meant to be “the most sensitive measurement ever made of spacetime itself.”
According to Joanna Carver and David Nelson of Medill Reports Chicago, "the Holometer will measure gravitational waves at a scale smaller than any technology of its kind has yet been capable of doing. When looking at waves at such a small scale, quantum mechanics and general relativity no longer apply, making it possible to see whether the universe is flat and everyone’s eyes are playing tricks on them."
What these physicists are in fact doing, is trying to understand the universe using the digital bit-like structure. This is one of the first experiments we have seen that looks into the principle that the universe may emerge from information. This hologram is the first machine to be developed that will test the concept that what we are seeing is an intricate illusion. In essence, this holometer attempts to prove that the world we live in is a hologram.
According to Clay Dillow of PopSci, "they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t exist at all, and that the 3-D universe we think we live in is nothing more than a hologram."
If this experiment is sucessful it will shift the foundations of what we currently think we know about space and time, forcing scientists to look into a whole new kind of physics that could replace and change our current understanding of the world.
This digital age is changing what we currently know and see. Not only is it allowing science to be at our fingertips, it also giving us a key to understand it better. It's giving physicists a whole new way to theorize about our world, and giving them a way to test it too. In fact, it's allowing them to look into the possibility of a matrix. How cool is that?