Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
Dalton, Thompson. Crap. On 26 Mar 2011, at 17:19, Anand Manikutty wrote: Some day when I can afford to not hold down a full time job I'd like to get some formal training in Philosophy even though my current instinct is to hate it for its eminent unsuitability to tackling the subject. I respectfully disagree that that is the job of philosophers really. This is really about cosmology. Whether or not the universe is a hologram is a question best left to physicists. Pace Paramarthananda, ideas related to the reality of the Universe in premodern Indian texts (the Advaita of Sankara, et cetera) do not have a basis in the scientific method. The revolution in our understanding of the nature of matter came with the work of Dalton, Thompson, et cetera. We have some comments on these strands of opinion in the teaching materials accompanying our book The Essence of Leadership. In a nutshell, we don't believe that there is much to be gained from studying premodern Indian history if the aim is to gain a better understanding of the nature of the universe. Anand P.S. More (to follow) here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/324
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 07:29:27AM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: There's this new-fangled thingy called a blog that is also similar, I hear. Blog? Is that one of these new Intarweb things?
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
I think you are implying that atomic/molecular physics is a complicated subject, but perhaps I am not understanding you. Anand --- In silk-l...@yahoogroups.com, Chetan Nagendra chetan@... wrote: Dalton, Thompson. Crap. On 26 Mar 2011, at 17:19, Anand Manikutty wrote: Some day when I can afford to not hold down a full time job I'd like to get some formal training in Philosophy even though my current instinct is to hate it for its eminent unsuitability to tackling the subject. I respectfully disagree that that is the job of philosophers really. This is really about cosmology. Whether or not the universe is a hologram is a question best left to physicists. Pace Paramarthananda, ideas related to the reality of the Universe in premodern Indian texts (the Advaita of Sankara, et cetera) do not have a basis in the scientific method. The revolution in our understanding of the nature of matter came with the work of Dalton, Thompson, et cetera. We have some comments on these strands of opinion in the teaching materials accompanying our book The Essence of Leadership. In a nutshell, we don't believe that there is much to be gained from studying premodern Indian history if the aim is to gain a better understanding of the nature of the universe. Anand P.S. More (to follow) here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/324
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
No, I was just responding to your penitent preoccupation with Western ideology, while denouncing several thousand years of so-called Indian non-scientific thought. On 27 Mar 2011, at 18:55, manikuttyanand wrote: I think you are implying that atomic/molecular physics is a complicated subject, but perhaps I am not understanding you. Anand --- In silk-l...@yahoogroups.com, Chetan Nagendra chetan@... wrote: Dalton, Thompson. Crap. On 26 Mar 2011, at 17:19, Anand Manikutty wrote: Some day when I can afford to not hold down a full time job I'd like to get some formal training in Philosophy even though my current instinct is to hate it for its eminent unsuitability to tackling the subject. I respectfully disagree that that is the job of philosophers really. This is really about cosmology. Whether or not the universe is a hologram is a question best left to physicists. Pace Paramarthananda, ideas related to the reality of the Universe in premodern Indian texts (the Advaita of Sankara, et cetera) do not have a basis in the scientific method. The revolution in our understanding of the nature of matter came with the work of Dalton, Thompson, et cetera. We have some comments on these strands of opinion in the teaching materials accompanying our book The Essence of Leadership. In a nutshell, we don't believe that there is much to be gained from studying premodern Indian history if the aim is to gain a better understanding of the nature of the universe. Anand P.S. More (to follow) here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/324
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
Some day when I can afford to not hold down a full time job I'd like to get some formal training in Philosophy even though my current instinct is to hate it for its eminent unsuitability to tackling the subject. I respectfully disagree that that is the job of philosophers really. This is really about cosmology. Whether or not the universe is a hologram is a question best left to physicists. Pace Paramarthananda, ideas related to the reality of the Universe in premodern Indian texts (the Advaita of Sankara, et cetera) do not have a basis in the scientific method. The revolution in our understanding of the nature of matter came with the work of Dalton, Thompson, et cetera. We have some comments on these strands of opinion in the teaching materials accompanying our book The Essence of Leadership. In a nutshell, we don't believe that there is much to be gained from studying premodern Indian history if the aim is to gain a better understanding of the nature of the universe. Anand P.S. More (to follow) here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/324
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 10:49 PM, Anand Manikutty manikuttyan...@yahoo.com wrote: Anand P.S. More (to follow) here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/324 The list you mentioned has only one member - you and only one poster - you. Is this intentional ? -- Vinayak
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
Yes. I prefer it that way. Anand P.S. More here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/327 From: Vinayak Hegde vinay...@gmail.com To: silklist@lists.hserus.net Cc: Anand Manikutty manikuttyan...@yahoo.com Sent: Sat, March 26, 2011 10:33:37 AM Subject: Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram... On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 10:49 PM, Anand Manikutty manikuttyan...@yahoo.com wrote: Anand P.S. More (to follow) here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/324 The list you mentioned has only one member - you and only one poster - you. Is this intentional ? -- Vinayak
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
At 2011-03-26 23:03:37 +0530, vinay...@gmail.com wrote: The list you mentioned has only one member - you and only one poster - you. Is this intentional ? Think of the one-person list as a place to post things, kinda like people used to have Geocities pages. But since Yahoo shut Geocities down, Yahoo groups was the only remaining option. -- ams
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote, [on 3/27/2011 12:19 AM]: Think of the one-person list as a place to post things, kinda like people used to have Geocities pages. But since Yahoo shut Geocities down, Yahoo groups was the only remaining option. There's this new-fangled thingy called a blog that is also similar, I hear. Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
[silk] The universe is a hologram...
I also attended some lectures by Paramarthananda,in Chennai, where he talked about Nirvishishta Advaithathis philosophy says much the same thing, that the Universe has no reality.
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 5:52 AM, Deepa Mohan mohande...@gmail.com wrote: I also attended some lectures by Paramarthananda,in Chennai, where he talked about Nirvishishta Advaithathis philosophy says much the same thing, that the Universe has no reality. I've always held that the Universe appears to be chaos with no deeper meaning or grand plan. This was the conclusion I came to in my early twenties when I was much troubled by the realities of human history. I've later read other philosophers at various times comment along the same lines. It's quite satisfying but at the same time I can't shake off the sense that it is grossly inefficient to reinvent the wheel. Especially when I recall the many times I've contemplated on a philosophical conundrum for days, even weeks or months on end before answering the question to my satisfaction, only to discover soon enough that there's been generations of philosophers who've covered the same ground and come to broadly the same conclusions as me. No doubt these armies of philosophers before me have covered all sorts of edge cases and explanations but the broad essentials of the philosophy match. Considering the inefficiency, I've tried not to repeat this, but the act of thinking is quite unconscious and exciting at the same time that it's often too late in the process that it occurs to me to look at what others have found out. Even then I don't think I would understand the concepts without the help of my own discoveries tilling the field before it. Some day when I can afford to not hold down a full time job I'd like to get some formal training in Philosophy even though my current instinct is to hate it for its eminent unsuitability to tackling the subject. Cheeni
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.comwrote: Considering the inefficiency, I've tried not to repeat this, but the act of thinking is quite unconscious and exciting at the same time that it's often too late in the process that it occurs to me to look at what others have found out. Even then I don't think I would understand the concepts without the help of my own discoveries tilling the field before it. On the other hand maybe it's no so inefficient if you think that almost all Philosophers who've decided to proclaim their ideas have spent a lot of their time arguing over it, whereas I'm sure there were many quiet philosophers who answered the questions to their own satisfaction and then went on with their lives. Cheeni
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 8:27 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.comwrote: I'd like to get some formal training in Philosophy even though my current instinct is to hate it for its eminent unsuitability to tackling the subject. Lovely pair of ducks, Cheeni! :)
Re: [silk] The universe is a hologram...
On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Deepa Mohan mohande...@gmail.com wrote: the Universe has no reality. What does this mean? What is a universe? How would you know if it were real, not real, or something else? On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 1:57 AM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.com wrote: I've always held that the Universe appears to be chaos with no deeper meaning or grand plan. No deeper meaning. Check. No grand plan. Check. Chaos. Nope. Obviously false on the face of it. I see negative entropy all around me. -- Charles
[silk] The Universe is a hologram?
A similar theory was proposed by David Bohm and discussed here way back in 1998 [1]. Udhay [1] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/933 Our world may be a giant hologram * 15 January 2009 by Marcus Chown DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres. For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century. For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into grains, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time, says Hogan. If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram. The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface. The holographic principle challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true. Susskind and 't Hooft's remarkable idea was motivated by ground-breaking work on black holes by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely black but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox. Bekenstein's work provided an important clue in resolving the paradox. He discovered that a black hole's entropy - which is synonymous with its information content - is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. This is the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for infalling matter or light. Theorists have since shown that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates. Crucially, this provides a deep physical insight: the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole - not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram. Susskind and 't Hooft extended the insight to the universe as a whole on the basis that the cosmos has a horizon too - the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe. What's more, work by several string theorists, most notably Juan
