Scientists find evidence that universe may be a hologram

Physicists in Japan have provided the most compelling evidence yet that string theory could be true.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena devised a string theory for the universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings. These strings would exist in nine dimensions and time, but would actually be a hologram and real events would occur on a flatter cosmos without any gravity and project into these dimensions. This theory has fascinated scientists for more than a decade, but providing evidence has proved very difficult.

Now, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues have published two papers to the arXiv repository providing evidence for Maldacena’s theory of the universe.

In the first paper the scientists used string theory to predict the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon from where not even light escapes, its entropy, and other properties, as well as the effects of “virtual particles” that continually appear and disappear.

In the second paper, the scientists determined the internal energy of the corresponding less complex flat cosmos that exists without gravity, and tellingly the two calculations match.

As these two models offer the same conclusions, physicists hope that this could lead to scientists one day be able to explain the gravitational properties of our universe in terms of quantum theory.