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Black Holes Are Like A Hologram


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The theory of relativity describes black holes as being spherical, smooth and simple. Quantum theory describes them as being extremely complex and full of information. New research now proposes a surprising solution to this apparent duality.

 

 

Reprinted from the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy.

 

We all remember that incredible image of a black hole that traveled around the world about a year ago. Yet, according to new research by scientists in Italy, black holes could be like a hologram, where all the information is amassed in a two-dimensional surface able to reproduce a three-dimensional image. In this way, these cosmic bodies, as affirmed by quantum theories, could be incredibly complex and concentrate an enormous amount of information inside themselves, as the largest hard disk that exists in nature, in two dimensions. This idea aligns with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which describes black holes as three dimensional, simple, spherical, and smooth, as they appear in that famous image. In short, black holes “appear” as three dimensional, just like holograms. The study which demonstrates it, and which unites two discordant theories, has recently been published in Physical Review X.

 

The study comes from the SISSA, and from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), all based in Italy.

 

The mystery of black holes

 

For scientists, black holes are a big question mark for many reasons. They are, for example, excellent representatives of the great difficulties of theoretical physics in putting together the principles of Einstein’s general theory of relativity with those of quantum physics when it comes to gravity. According to the first theory, they would be simple bodies without information. According to the other, as claimed by Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking, they would be “the most complex existing systems” because they would be characterized by an enormous “entropy,” which measures the complexity of a system, and consequently would have a lot of information inside them.

 

The holographic principle applied to black holes

 

To study black holes, the two authors of the research, Francesco Benini (SISSA Professor, ICTP scientific consultant and INFN researcher) and Paolo Milan (SISSA and INFN researcher), used an idea almost 30 years old, but still surprising, called the holographic principle.

 

The researchers said:

This revolutionary and somewhat counterintuitive principle proposes that the behavior of gravity in a given region of space can alternatively be described in terms of a different system, which lives only along the edge of that region and therefore in a one less dimension.

And, more importantly, in this alternative description (called holographic) gravity does not appear explicitly. In other words, the holographic principle allows us to describe gravity using a language that does not contain gravity, thus avoiding friction with quantum mechanics.

Read on:

https://earthsky.org/space/black-holes-are-like-a-hologram

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Black holes? They are like a hologram in which all the information to produce a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface

Is Our Universe a Hologram?

 

We take for granted that we exist as 3-D beings in a 3-D universe, but physicists suggest that our world is just the projection of a reality written in 2-D. Scientific American editor Michael Moyer explains.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/is-our-universe-a-hologram-video/

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