Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Nautilus

    How Our Universe Could Emerge as a Hologram

    by Natalie Wolchover Feb 26, 2019 4 minutes

    Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.

    Physicists have devised a holographic model of “de Sitter space,” the term for a universe like ours, that could give us new clues about the origin of space and time.Drawing by Xi Dong

    The fabric of space and time is widely believed by physicists to be emergent, stitched out of quantum threads according to an unknown pattern. And for 22 years, they’ve had a toy model of how emergent space-time can work: a theoretical “universe in a bottle,” as its discoverer, Juan Maldacena, has described it.

    The space-time filling the region inside the bottle—a continuum that bends and undulates, producing the force called gravity—exactly

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from Nautilus

    Nautilus2 min read
    Color-Coding Crops for Climate Change
    Green is the color of growth in the plant world. From an aerial view, most farms blanket the land in quilts of varying shades of green. But what if the stems and leaves of your average corn, barley, and rice plants were hairy and blue instead? One te
    Nautilus7 min read
    Insects and Other Animals May Have Consciousness
    In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Give
    Nautilus7 min read
    A Radical Rescue for Caribbean Reefs
    It’s an all-too-familiar headline: Coral reefs are in crisis. Indeed, in the past 50 years, roughly half of Earth’s coral reefs have died. Coral ecosystems are among the most biodiverse and valuable places on Earth, supporting upward of 860,000 speci

    Related