Holograms may save physics

Even though general relativity is at its core obtuse mathematics and has been relegated to the Department of Mathematics rather than true physics for decades, you experience relativity’s technological gifts every time you navigate to your favorite restaurant. GPS, or Global Positioning System, consists of a network of orbiting satellites that continuously emit timely data. Your phone compares these signals to determine your location on Earth. But there are space-time differences between the Earth’s surface and satellite orbits. If you don’t take general relativity into account, your navigation will go wrong and you’ll be late for dinner.

As revolutions go, general relativity was a major revolution. As unification goes, this is a warning. To achieve this union, Einstein had to fundamentally and permanently change not only our conception of gravity as a force acting through space and time, but also our conception of space and time themselves. To bridge this gap, our entire philosophical understanding of the relationship between space and time has been overhauled.

As Einstein discovered over the next few decades until his death, it was almost impossible to bring other forces, such as electromagnetism, into the same unified fold. Electromagnetism and other forces cannot be conceptualized in the same way. Instead, we have to use quantum probabilities to make predictions, and when we apply the same technique to gravity, we just get infinity.

This was Einstein’s nightmare when he woke up. This is the demon that haunts the equation. This is the driving wedge between gravity and electromagnetic forces. This is a thorn in the side of our failure to achieve unity and nirvana. Just as Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein unified in the past, solving this problem, cracking this hellish puzzle, moving in, through, or between infinities will require our understanding of the fabric of reality to occur A complete revolution.

Thankfully, we are not alone in this pursuit. The dream of unifying the great forces of physics – quantum and gravity did not end with the death of Einstein. Since his death, hundreds of physicists have taken up this mantle, in some way, big or small. Ways contributed to the cause and passed on their knowledge. To the next generation.

The search for that long-held dream is not over yet, but over the course of nearly a century, one contender has risen to the top, a collection of extraordinary ideas that one day hopes will solidify into a proven, complete physics Theory of the Universe: String Theory. String theory creates a surprising idea: Our universe is not what it seems.is called Holographic principle, which points out that our universe is not the three dimensions we are familiar with, but is actually just an incredibly thin two-dimensional brane. In this framework, all the information content of the universe can be projected onto its surface without losing a single bit, and once in place, gravity itself disappears and is replaced by more familiar quantum forces.

This is what holography does. The mapping from the universe to its boundaries preserves all necessary information. The primary goal of holography has been achieved. This in itself is a surprising and unexpected delight, and Nature should have allowed such a mapping to occur in the first place. But then it goes one step further. The best way to solve quantum gravity seems to be to apply holography, making gravity itself disappear. No more messy mathematics, no more infinite piles, no more convulsions of space and time. This is just an ordinary quantum theory, and we’ve become very good at solving it with ordinary quantum tools.

So far, this holographic idea has remained speculative. But it does hold great promise.