Physicists at Fermilab in Illinois have turned on a laser-based experiment that could reveal whether the three-dimensional world we perceive is merely a "Matrix"-style illusion generated by a cosmic two-dimensional hologram.
The Holometer experiment is the result of years of work by particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan and his colleagues at the federally funded Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and it could provide the first clear evidence for the existence of the holographic universe. The concept has been debated fordecades, but it's devilishly difficult to show whether it can ever be anything more than a concept.
Hogan aims to find out whether the universe is a hologram by looking for telltale quantum jitters in the fabric of space-time itself. "If we see something, it will completely change ideas about space we've used for thousands of years," he said in a news release.
REIDAR HAHN / FERMILAB
The Holometer — short for "holographic interferometer" — consists of two interferometers, each of which fires a 1-kilowatt laser beam at a beam splitter, and then down two perpendicular 130-foot (40-meter) arms. The laser light is then reflected back to the beam splitter and recombines. If the splitter has moved slightly due to jitters in the space-time continuum, subtle fluctuations in the light should reveal the effect.
The apparatus is moving all the time, of course — but the Holometer is tuned to detect differences on the scale of less than a millionth of a second. Scientists should be able to filter out the effects of physical motion as well as radio noise from the electronics in the lab.
"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 space-time,” said Fermilab physicist Aaron Chou, lead scientist and project manager for the Holometer. "It's an exciting moment for physics. A positive result will open a whole new avenue of questioning about how space works."
How space-time (might) work
The traditional view is that our universe has three spatial dimensions, with time serving as the fourth dimension. String theorists say the equations that govern quantum mechanics and gravity become more elegant if the universe has six or seven additional dimensions. Physicists will be looking for evidence of those higher dimensions when Europe's Large Hadron Collider starts up again next year.
