Columbus and Thomas Friedman might have gotten it right after all. But it’s the universe, not the Earth, that might be flat – a 2-dimensional hologram, according to an international team of researchers.
Holograms might be most familiar as the colorful 3-D images used as security measures on some credit cards and currencies. But of course, they’re not really 3-dimensional, are they? They contain all the information necessary for our eyes to perceive them that way, but the pictures are actually printed on a 2-D surface. A new calculation, published last Monday in Physical Review Letters, says that models describing our early universe similarly have now been shown to agree with recent observations just as well as standard 3-D models do.
The sticking point is gravity. Ever since Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity described the force that keeps our feet on the ground as a consequence of the shape of space, it’s been giving physicists headaches.
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