A new study is seeking answers to the question of whether the three-dimensional world as we know it is a reality, or just an illusion.
One of the U.S. Department of Energy's laboratories, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has started a new experimental program called the Holometer that they hope will shed some light on the workings of our universe.
Scientists and mathematicians have long toyed with the idea that there could be an extra dimension we're not perceiving. Edwin Abbott Abbott's 1884 novella "Flatlands" is a look into a world where characters only perceive two dimensions, completely unaware that there could be a third dimension. People have used concepts like the one in "Flatlands" to explain how we humans could be unaware of a possible fourth dimension that we cannot perceive.
However, the new Holometer experiment is suggesting the opposite: that the third dimension we see could just be an illusion, and the world is actually a 2-D hologram. Television and movies seem to have three dimensions, for example, but they are just on a flat screen with two dimensions. The scientists behind the Holometer are suggesting that our universe could consist of "pixels" like the pixels that make up the seemingly "3-D" world of TV that is actually flat. If the world is truly made of "pixels," scientists have estimated that these pixels would be about 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom.
Craig Hogan, the director of the Fermi Laboratory's Center for Particle Astrophysics, said that he hopes to discover whether spacetime is a quantum system just like matter is. "If we see something, it will completely change ideas about space we've used for thousands of years."
The Holometer experiment is testing the ability of the universe to hold information. It's a holographic interferometer, a machine that can test the quantum movement of space. It uses two interferometers that are close next to each other. Each interferometer emits a one-kilowatt laser beam that is pointed toward a beam splitter. The light from the laser is sent back to the beam splitter and they combine again. If there is movement, there are fluctuations, which are then studied. They expect to find "holographic noise" at all frequencies, but to weed out vibrations that could be caused by normal motion, they are focusing on an extremely high frequency.
"If we find a noise we can't get rid of, we might be detecting something fundamental about nature-a noise that is intrinsic to spacetime," said physicist Aaron Chou, who is the lead scientist for the Holometer project. "It's an exciting moment for physics. A positive result will open a whole new avenue of questioning about how space works."
