The Universe Is A 'Vast And Complex' Hologram, According To Study

The holographic principle makes scientists understand the universe easier.

The Telegraph reported that scientists at the University of Southampton with colleagues from Canada and Italy describe the universe as a "vast and complex" hologram. While people tend to imagine the universe in 3D, a 2D picture of the infinite astronomical region makes it easier for scientists to study the cosmos.

Proposed by physicist Leonard Susskind in the 1990s, the hologram gives a flat surface an illusion of having depth. According to Susskind, many of the laws of physics can be explained mathematically with the use of two dimensions. This theory was supported by cosmologists as the holographic principle could help them figure out how gravity works in miniature scales.

It worked the same in this recent study conducted by Niayesh Afshordi, Claudio Corianò, Luigi Delle Rose, Elizabeth Gould and Kostas Skenderis. They used the principle to study the origin of the cosmos and found out that using a 2D scale is better at displaying data than their 3D scale.

"We test a class of holographic models for the very early Universe against cosmological observations and find that they are competitive to the standard cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant (ΛCDM) of cosmology," the researchers wrote in the study's abstract.

"These models are based on three-dimensional perturbative superrenormalizable quantum field theory (QFT), and, while they predict a different power spectrum from the standard power law used in ΛCDM, they still provide an excellent fit to the data (within their regime of validity)," they continued. "By comparing the Bayesian evidence for the models, we find that ΛCDM does a better job globally, while the holographic models provide a (marginally) better fit to the data without very low multipoles (i.e., l≲30), where the QFT becomes nonperturbative."

This study has been published in the journal American Physical Society.