Experiment tests whether universe is a

hologram

Part of the Holometer, which aims to find evidence of the fundamental units of space-time
The search for the fundamental units of space and time has officially begun. Physicists at the Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois, announced this week that the Holometer,
a device designed to test whether we live in a giant hologram, has started taking data.
The experiment is testing the idea that the universe is actually made up of tiny "bits", in a similar
way to how a newspaper photo is actually made up of dots. These fundamental units of space and
time would be unbelievably tiny: a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. And like
the well-known quantum behaviour of matter and energy, these bits of space-time would behave
more like waves than particles.
"The theory is that space is made of waves instead of points, that everything is a little jittery, and
never sits still," says Craig Hogan at the University of Chicago, who dreamed up the experiment.
The Holometer is designed to measure this "jitter". The surprisingly simple device is operated from
a shed in a field near Chicago, and consists of two powerful laser beams that are directed through
tubes 40 metres long. The lasers precisely measure the positions of mirrors along their paths at two
points in time.
If space-time is smooth and shows no quantum behaviour, then the mirrors should remain perfectly
still. But if both lasers measure an identical, small difference in the mirrors' position over time,
that could mean the mirrors are being jiggled about by fluctuations in the fabric of space itself.
So what of the idea that the universe is a hologram? This stems from the notion that information
cannot be destroyed, so for example the 2D event horizon of a black hole "records" everything that
falls into it. If this is the case, then the boundary of the universe could also form a 2D representation
of everything contained within the universe, like a hologram storing a 3D image in 2D .
Hogan cautions that the idea that the universe is a hologram is somewhat misleading because it
suggests that our experience is some kind of illusion, a projection like a television screen. If the
Holometer finds a fundamental unit of space, it won't mean that our 3D world doesn't exist. Rather
it will change the way we understand its basic makeup. And so far, the machine appears to be
working.
In a presentation given in Chicago on Monday at the International Conference on Particle Physics
and Cosmology, Hogan said that the initial results show the Holometer is capable of measuring
quantum fluctuations in space-time, if they are there.
"This was kind of an amazing moment," says Hogan. "It's just noise right now we don't know
whether it's space-time noise but the machine is operating at that specification."
Hogan expects that the Holometer will have gathered enough data to put together an answer to the
quantum question within a year. If the space-time jitter is there, Hogan says it could underpin
entirely new explanations for why the expansion of our universe is accelerating, something
traditionally attributed to the little understood phenomenon of dark energy.
Ann Nelson, a physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, says the Holometer is a novel
experiment for probing space on the smallest scales. But even if the experiment finds something,
the wider implications for physics are still not well understood.
"It would mean that all our standard assumptions about space-time and effective local theories are
wrong, at least when gravity is important," she says.