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Mathematicians crunching the numbers that describe Black Holes on a quantum level might have solved a major gravity puzzle. Astrophysicists have been searching for a whole bunch of missing “dark matter.” Albert Einstein insists the stuff has to be there because we need it to hold the universe together. The reason we can’t find missing matter is that the structure could be built right in to the universe itself, no accessories needed. It’s automatically part of the “fractal” nature in a “holographic” universe.
Beautiful quantum confusion
To talk about a whole universe that’s holographic, it helps to know what a “hologram” is. Just like the nifty 3-d moving projection of Princess Leia and her dire warning was carried around in the data banks of R2D2, a hologram is a three dimensional image stored on a two dimensional medium.
Experts are almost convinced that the entire three dimensional universe we live and work in is mapped out somewhere on the quantum level in two dimensions. Vox describes it as the same as “characters on a TV screen.” They “live on a flat surface that happens to look like it has depth.”
While that idea seems like nothing more than a movie script, the mathematicians take it seriously. Things that are holographic are usually “self-referential,” which makes them “fractal” as well. Self-reference is a tail swallowing paradox like a computer subroutine named “loop” that contains the code to “call loop.”
It’s easy to see that you may not want to wait around for the program to end. Guys who study quantum mechanics are used to little snags like that. They invent new ways of describing the problem with numbers and the discrepancies magically disappear. That’s why they spend so long in college.
An article recently put up for peer review in the journal Nature Communications lays out the controversial ideas. It’s all part of the overall effort to come up with the holy grail “theory of everything.”
Scientists call it the “unified field theory.” It gets that name because the proper model has to “describe all the laws of nature within a single framework – connecting Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes the universe on a large scale, and quantum mechanics, which describes our world at the atomic level.”
Laws of nature
The fundamental laws of nature can’t be broken, no matter how hard you try. Physicists would be happy if they simply knew what they all were. Quantum gravity drives them totally nuts. “We strive to understand the laws of nature and the language in which these are written is mathematics.”
That means when they “seek answers to questions in physics, we are often led to new discoveries in mathematics too.” Those who study such things are challenged by not a being able to cage a black hole in the lab.
Daniel Persson, Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Chalmers university of technology, explains that a “unified description” is needed to study black holes. On the everyday world “macroscopic” level, black holes are fairly easy objects to understand.
“A sufficiently heavy star expands and collapses under its own gravitational force, so that all its mass is concentrated in an extremely small volume.” Studying the quantum one dimensional point “singularity” weighing more than hundreds of separate stars, takes some really intimidating calculations.
The new way to describe gravity arising at the quantum level as “an ‘emergent‘ phenomenon” means looking at it as similar to the way “chaotic” movements of the individual particles in a coffee spill flow in such a way that the dry spot always has a ring. The coffee ring emerges from the orderly “flow” of liquid. It works like that with gravity.
Robert Berman, Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the Chalmers University of Technology explains how he did it. “Using techniques from the mathematics that I have researched before, we managed to formulate an explanation for how gravity emerges by the holographic principle.“
