What If the Universe Was Just an Illusion?

WHAT IF

Some physicists believe we're living in a giant hologram.

Transcript

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)

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