New Scientist - Our world may be a giant hologram

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: 'If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.'

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

[...]Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

[...] At magnification, the fabric of space-time becomes grainy and is ultimately made of tiny units rather like pixels, but a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. [...]  Hogan realised that the holographic principle changes everything. If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. 'Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry,' says Hogan.
[...] 'Forget Quantum of Solace, we would have directly observed the quantum of time,' says Hogan. 'It's the smallest possible interval of time - the Planck length divided by the speed of light.'"

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Edit:

This is why I like Reddit.

The Double Helix (amazon.com)

This documentary about the work and the people behind this years prizes in Physics, Medicine and Chemistry is incredibly inspiring.

svtplay.se >> vetenskapens värld >> nobelspecial

Hopefully, the Nobel foundation will pick up the pace and improve their web presence and their media library.
nobelprize.org >> mediaplayer

from wired.com:

Secret Math of Fly Eyes Could Overhaul Robot Vision

““We can build a system that works perfectly well, inspired by biology, without having a complete understanding of how the components interact. It’s a non-linear system,” said David O’Carroll, a computational neuroscientist who studies insect vision at Australia’s University of Adelaide. “The number of computations involved is quite small. We can get an answer using tens of thousands of times less floating-point computations than in traditional ways.”

The best-known of these is the Lucas-Kanade method, which calculates yaw — up-and-down, side-to-side motion changes — by comparing, frame by frame, how every pixel in a visual field changes. It’s used for steering and guidance in many experimental unmanned vehicles, but its brute-force approach requires lots of processing power, making it impractical in smaller systems.

In order to make smaller flying robots, researchers would like to find a simpler way of processing motion. Inspiration has come from the lowly fly, which uses just a relative handful of neurons to maneuver with extraordinary dexterity. And for more than a decade, O’Carroll and other researchers researchers have painstakingly studied the optical flight circuits of flies, measuring their cell-by-cell activity and turning evolution’s solutions into a set of computational principles.

[...] “A laptop computer uses tens of watts of power. Implementing what we’ve developed can be done with chips that consume just a fraction of a milliwatt,” said O’Carroll.“

A truly humbling presentation of the project of understanding the human brain - and constructing a supercomputer to model it.

The implications of the project are huge in so many ways. What happens when it is possible to model the brain, and everybody can tap into virtually infinite computing power at all times in the cloud - where everybody's virtual brain will be hosted next to each other, communicating super-effective/efficient with one another.