In “Existence special: Cosmic mysteries, human questions,” New Scientist grapples with critical questions like Marcus Chown’s “Am I a hologram? (25 July, 2011):
It sounds preposterous, yet there is already some evidence that it may be true, and we could know for sure within a couple of years. If it does turn out to be the case, it would turn our common-sense conception of reality inside out.
Whose hologram?
A positive result would challenge every assumption we have about the world we live in. It would show that everything is a projection of something occurring on a flat surface billions of light years away from where we perceive ourselves to be. As yet we have no idea what that “something” might be, or how it could manifest itself as a world in which we can do the school run or catch a movie at the cinema. Maybe it would make no difference to the way we live our lives, but somehow I doubt it.
Maybe. It’s worth noting that the data coming back from the Large Hadron Collider are not confirming bizarre scenarios. That, some would suggest, might well make a real difference to how we live our lives.
As physicist Rob Sheldon puts it,
… these “mysteries” that New Scientist is hyping will bring traffic to their site, are all “naturalism fails” topics, and of course, the solutions all involve “believing what necessarily ain’t so”. But rather than see it as the devolution of naturalism into religion, one might also see it as the beginning of the end of the Enlightenment paradigm. Kuhn said there were lots of these problems right before a paradigm shift, and I think we are now seeing it.
Thoughts?