Some physicists believe we're living in a giant hologram.
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00:00 (birds chirping)
00:05 What if the Universe is an illusion?
00:09 What if your reality is not what it seems to be?
00:12 What if you are just a two-dimensional projection
00:15 stretched on the surface of a black hole?
00:18 And what does a black hole have to do with all this?
00:22 This is WHAT IF,
00:23 and here's what would happen
00:25 if you lived inside a hologram.
00:29 I know what you think.
00:30 This isn't real.
00:32 How can we live in a hologram
00:34 if everything around us is three-dimensional?
00:37 Well, prepare yourself for a big reality check,
00:41 because this unified theory can explain everything
00:44 about the fundamental laws of our existence.
00:48 The Holographic Principle.
00:50 We talked about it a little in the episode
00:52 where a black hole deleted the Universe.
00:54 You may want to watch that one again.
00:56 Because of all places,
00:58 the Holographic Principle starts in a black hole.
01:03 When you eat, say, a bagel,
01:05 your mass increases by the mass of that bagel.
01:09 With your mass increased,
01:10 your volume grows,
01:11 and so does your surface area.
01:14 For a black hole, it's different.
01:16 It's only the surface area,
01:18 and not the volume,
01:19 that increases with every bite.
01:21 It's like the swallowed matter or energy
01:23 doesn't make it inside the black hole,
01:25 but rather gets stuck to its surface.
01:28 Or like if you, instead of eating the bagel,
01:30 just taped it to the outside of your stomach.
01:32 Black holes themselves are three-dimensional,
01:35 but their contents can be projected
01:37 on their two-dimensional surface.
01:39 And that gave scientists the idea
01:41 of the holographic world.
01:44 You, me, and everything else in the Universe
01:47 is made up of atoms and molecules.
01:50 Atoms and molecules are made up of smaller,
01:52 subatomic particles.
01:54 And those particles, in turn,
01:55 are made up of something even smaller,
01:58 the information about their state in time and in space.
02:03 These particles are so small
02:04 that our eyes can't detect them.
02:06 We just know they're there.
02:08 And we know they don't answer
02:09 to the classical laws of physics.
02:11 It's up to quantum mechanics
02:13 to interpret their nature.
02:15 One of the ways to understand
02:16 the smallest fundamental particles
02:18 is through the string theory.
02:20 The string theory is purely theoretical,
02:22 and the mathematics behind it is complicated.
02:25 Nobody has ever solved it yet,
02:26 but maybe we can change the rules a little bit.
02:29 If you're trying to solve a complicated problem,
02:32 you can map all the volume of the Universe
02:34 across its boundary,
02:36 like a hologram.
02:37 The nature of the problem changes
02:39 because for the two-dimensional Universe,
02:41 we don't need to count quantum gravity in.
02:44 That turns the nearly impossible-to-crack
02:46 mathematics of the string theory
02:48 to maybe doable equations.
02:50 It's not a solution yet,
02:52 just a shortcut to the solution.
02:54 But once you figure out how to solve it,
02:56 you can transform the solution
02:58 into our three-dimensional space.
03:00 Congratulations!
03:01 You solved the mystery of the Universe
03:03 and how it started,
03:04 through the hologram.
03:05 But does that mean we ourselves
03:07 are living inside a hologram?
03:09 And what would it be like
03:10 to be a hologram?
03:12 When you take a selfie,
03:14 you lose some of the information about yourself.
03:16 When you later look at the picture,
03:18 you can't see the back of your head.
03:20 The holograms are designed
03:22 to preserve all of that information.
03:24 If you experienced the world
03:25 in a holographic way,
03:27 you could look at someone else's skin
03:29 and tell everything about their organs,
03:31 what they ate for lunch,
03:32 even their thoughts.
03:34 Is it just me, or does that sound creepy?
03:37 The fundamental laws of our Universe,
03:39 from black holes,
03:41 to the smallest particles,
03:42 to the laws of our reality,
03:44 could be potentially described
03:46 with the help of the holographic principle.
03:48 It doesn't necessarily mean
03:49 we live inside a hologram,
03:51 but if we did,
03:52 we wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.
03:55 Maybe time doesn't exist either.
03:58 But that's a story for another WHAT IF.
04:01 [music]
04:03 (upbeat music)