| I think this idea is almost certainly false, and it has it's genesis from a mostly discredited psuedo-physics theory called the holographic universe[1]. But at least there is a testable prediction! In my opinion, the fact that they offer a testable prediction merits a more thorough consideration of the claims. First of all, it has been well understood for multiple decades that the General Relativity(GR) breaks down, and is no longer true, at mass/energy scales that are present inside of a black hole. This is known because physical quantities must be finite, but GR predicts the strength of a gravitational field inside of a black hole is infinite. If string theory is true (and I don't believe it is), then this would be a valid situation to apply it to, since we know that there is unknown physics at play inside of a black hole. Furthermore, the standard big bang cosmology is based on the idea that the beginning of time is a "black hole in time", in the sense that as t->0, the strength of the gravitational field diverges to infinity. Thus, it has been well known for decades that GR is not a valid physical theory at very short time scales after the beginning of time (this would be the epoch of inflation[3]). It is perhaps not apparent to the casual observer that this paper is based on a very bizarre sect within string theory, known as the "Holographic Universe", which according to Wikipedia "suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a two-dimensional information structure "painted" on the cosmological horizon". This is just a bunch of fancy words designed to blow smoke in your eyes, and the entire theory is sort of a joke as far as most physicists I know are concerned. There are actually a number of strange cults within string theory, another one that is good for a laugh is the Anthropic Princple[4]. This theory claims that even though the 11 dimensional D-Brane that is folded into a Calubi-Yau manifold upon which string theory is based predicts trillions of possible universes, the universe we live in exists because it is the only possible one we could live in: "the conditions happen to be just right for the existence of (intelligent) life on the earth at the present time. For if they were not just right, then we should not have found ourselves to be here now, but somewhere else, at some other appropriate time." This kind of nonsense is why I left research in theoretical physics to purse computer science and programming, which truly is the cutting edge of science. There is a lot of valuable physics research going on in material science departments(for example), but the string theory department needs to constantly justify their funding by making extremely bold claims such as "what we perceive as the Big Bang could be the three-dimensional “mirage” of a collapsing star in a universe profoundly different than our own". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-brane [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology) [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle |
The Anthropic Principle is a common sense explanation to why our universe has a paradoxically perfect ("fine-tuned" by 120 orders of magnitude off what we would expect) cosmological constant that is just right for life and the universe to exist. It's somewhat horrifying, but I haven't seen a better explanation for fine-tuning. [1]
The holographic principle does not seem to be supported by a "very bizarre sect". In fact, it seems to be one of the better explanations for the black hole information paradox. [2]
Nima Arkani-Hamed dedicated a significant portion of his Messenger Lectures [3] (same lectures where Feynman delivered his famous series) to the principles that you dismiss out of hand as laughable above.
I'm a little depressed that the top comment is computer science > theoretical physics. Theoretical physics predicts quantum scale behavior to 11-digit accuracy. It's no joke.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant#Quantum_f... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox [3] http://www.cornell.edu/video/nima-arkani-hamed-quantum-mecha...