The late Stephen Hawking’s final theory has finally been published and boy is it mind-boggling! It challenges all of the previous views people have about the multiverse and claims the universe is like a vast hologram. Before his passing on 14th March, the cosmologist’s final theory was published in the Journal Of High Energy Physics.
While the entirety of the study is rather challenging to grasp, the summary extends a notion that we could all be living in a holographic reality. Most cosmologists believe that, for a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded incredibly rapidly before settling into its present state, filled with stars and galaxies. Some have even proposed that the expansion goes on forever and that there is a mosaic of different universes with their own laws of physics. Many claim, that we just inhabit one of those small pocket universes in a region.
On the contrary, Prof Hawking was always sceptical about this idea and claimed it did not reconcile with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. His new theory embraces the strange concept that the universe is like a vast and complex hologram and that 3D reality is an illusion. The apparently “solid” world around us and the dimension of time are projected from information stored on a flat 2D surface.
The concept of a holographic universe emerged from string theory! The idea that the smallest building blocks of the universe consist of tiny vibrating strings. Prof Hertog from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven said;
It’s a very precise mathematical notion of holography that has come out of string theory in the last few years which is not fully understood but is mind-boggling and changes the scene completely. The key point is that we’re not projecting out a spatial dimension. We are projecting out the dimension of time from ‘before’ the Big Bang.
Applied to inflation, the newly published theory suggests that time and the beginning of the universe arose holographically from an unknowable state outside the Big Bang. Prof Hertog added;
It’s a theory that envisages a beginning to the universe where time is not present but our notion of time crystallises. It’s saying that time is fundamentally coming out of some other state for which we have no words. Some very abstract timeless state, that’s the best we can do.
Prof Hertog believes gravitational waves, ripples in space-time which were first detected in 2015, could provide a “smoking gun” to test the model. Prof Hawking said before his death;
We are not down to a single, unique universe, but our findings imply a significant reduction of the multiverse, to a much smaller range of possible universes.
So is the world a giant hologram? Could we possibly be living in a reality that is beyond our comprehension? Maybe we’ll just let time answer this one. Let us know what you think about this in the comments below.
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