APOD: The Holographic Principle (2017 Apr 23)

[APOD Robot]

The Holographic Principle

Explanation: Is this picture worth a thousand words? According to the Holographic Principle, the most information you can get from this image is about 3 x 1065 bits for a normal sized computer monitor. The Holographic Principle, yet unproven, states that there is a maximum amount of information content held by regions adjacent to any surface. Therefore, counter-intuitively, the information content inside a room depends not on the volume of the room but on the area of the bounding walls. The principle derives from the idea that the Planck length, the length scale where quantum mechanics begins to dominate classical gravity, is one side of an area that can hold only about one bit of information. The limit was first postulated by physicist Gerard 't Hooft in 1993. It can arise from generalizations from seemingly distant speculation that the information held by a black hole is determined not by its enclosed volume but by the surface area of its event horizon. The term "holographic" arises from a hologram analogy where three-dimension images are created by projecting light though a flat screen. Beware, other people looking at the featured image may not claim to see 3 x 1065 bits -- they might claim to see a teapot.

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[Batman's real butler]

"Therefore, counter-intuitively, the information content inside a room depends not on the volume of the room but on the area of the bounding walls."

Nothing counter-intuitive in that, much easier to put a room in order when there are cupboards with lots of space instead of just naked walls.

[RocketRon]

Teapot - it helps if you go slightly cross eyed initially....

It would be interesting to hear how the teapot etc is inserted into such images,
its not obvious from a casual closeup inspection
Presumably some sort of stereo effect ?

Classical gravity eh.
Whats next, new age gravity, dark gravity, fake gravity ?

[Chris Peterson]

Teapot - it helps if you go slightly cross eyed initially....

Do that and you'll get a very odd sort of teapot, indeed. The image is constructed to be looked at with the eyes parallel, not crossed.

It would be interesting to hear how the teapot etc is inserted into such images,
its not obvious from a casual closeup inspection
Presumably some sort of stereo effect ?

You can read all about autostereograms.

[Chris Peterson]

Whenever I see this stereogram, it brings to mind Russell's teapot.

[supamario]

Shift your gaze and you will also see another holographic effect - a smaller teapot in front of two larger teapots joined together.

[APODJOHN72]

Anyone know the formula that was used to get the 3X10^65 bits of "useful" information on a regular computer screen?

[ygmarchi]

't Hooft wrote the software to compute QCD. I hold this is just a delusion caused by confusing physics and information technology.

[neufer]

Whenever I see this stereogram, it brings to mind Russell's teapot.

Speaking of Russell's teapot:

The weather being what it was yesterday I decided to stay home and watch 'The March for Science' on C-SPAN. After it was over C-SPAN (for balance) replayed Wednesday's panel discussion by the conservative American Heritage Institute. There the AHI panel "argued" that scientific consensus (on global warming & Darwinian evolution in particular) was basically a contradiction in terms since science is primarily about skepticism.

However, science is primarily about:

• 1) putting forth a reasoned hypothesis (; e.g., man made CO₂ will melt the Arctic Ocean)
  2) collecting data to test that hypothesis
  3) analyzing the data in an unbiased fashion
  4) and coming up with a reasoned conclusion.

The American Heritage Institute panelists seemed to have little to no interest in doing any of these things. All they could do was to pat themselves on the back for "being truly scientific" by disagreeing among themselves on whether the government should be in the business of supporting science at all. (Let's make American science great again by making it dependent upon the generosity of wealthy Americans who want their names on things.)

[BDanielMayfield]

Classical gravity eh.
Whats next, new age gravity, dark gravity, fake gravity ?

Since you asked, perphaps, entropic gravity, aka emergent gravity.

Bruce

[Chris Peterson]

However, science is primarily about:

Yes. So many problems with the AHI arguments. Science is not about skepticism at all. Skepticism is simply a necessary quality for a scientist. And they completely misunderstand consensus. Within any given subject area, consensus is an important tool for focusing the direction that researchers devote their attention. Outside a given subject area, it's the most important method for non-experts to know what they should take as likely truth.

[heehaw]

Today's APOD is TERRIFIC!

[Chris Peterson]

Shift your gaze and you will also see another holographic effect - a smaller teapot in front of two larger teapots joined together.

To get the normal effect you merge adjacent pairs. If you go even more wall-eyed and merge every third, you get the effect you describe. It gets more odd as you go farther, which you can do if you're Marty Feldman, or maybe if you reduce the size of the image on your screen.

[Chris Peterson]

Anyone know the formula that was used to get the 3X10^65 bits of "useful" information on a regular computer screen?

Who said anything about "useful"? What does that even mean when applied to information? What image would you use to generate the maximum amount of information according to classical information theory? An image where every pixel has a random value! What book will have the maximum information content? One where every letter is chosen randomly. Because this APOD image has "useful" content, its information content is actually reduced.

FWIW, I think the information content suggested by the holographic principle has to do with the space the picture occupies, not with the actual content of the image. By classical information theory, an image the size (by pixel count, with 24-bit pixels) of today's has a maximum information content of about 43 bits.

[geckzilla]

However, science is primarily about:

Yes. So many problems with the AHI arguments. Science is not about skepticism at all. Skepticism is simply a necessary quality for a scientist. And they completely misunderstand consensus. Within any given subject area, consensus is an important tool for focusing the direction that researchers devote their attention. Outside a given subject area, it's the most important method for non-experts to know what they should take as likely truth.

Not that any of this matters to a group of people whose strategy is comprised entirely of doubt. They can be dead wrong about everything they say, but if it causes people to doubt, they still win.

[Chris Peterson]

However, science is primarily about:

Yes. So many problems with the AHI arguments. Science is not about skepticism at all. Skepticism is simply a necessary quality for a scientist. And they completely misunderstand consensus. Within any given subject area, consensus is an important tool for focusing the direction that researchers devote their attention. Outside a given subject area, it's the most important method for non-experts to know what they should take as likely truth.

Not that any of this matters to a group of people whose strategy is comprised entirely of doubt. They can be dead wrong about everything they say, but if it causes people to doubt, they still win.

It worked for a few decades with smoking. AHI was the main driver of the "smoking isn't dangerous" pseudoscience.

[geckzilla]

Yes. So many problems with the AHI arguments. Science is not about skepticism at all. Skepticism is simply a necessary quality for a scientist. And they completely misunderstand consensus. Within any given subject area, consensus is an important tool for focusing the direction that researchers devote their attention. Outside a given subject area, it's the most important method for non-experts to know what they should take as likely truth.

Not that any of this matters to a group of people whose strategy is comprised entirely of doubt. They can be dead wrong about everything they say, but if it causes people to doubt, they still win.

It worked for a few decades with smoking. AHI was the main driver of the "smoking isn't dangerous" pseudoscience.

I'm afraid it's going to work a lot longer with climate change. The connection between smoking and cancer has a high impact in a single human lifetime while climate change is going to take generations to have the same sort of impact, at least for the biggest contributors. I feel like most of the developed nations have a lot of buffering and can deal with certain things for quite a long time. Like in the opening credits for The Expanse where they're just putting walls around the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan... The Martians hold a lot of contempt for Earthers on this matter.

[Chris Peterson]

Not that any of this matters to a group of people whose strategy is comprised entirely of doubt. They can be dead wrong about everything they say, but if it causes people to doubt, they still win.

It worked for a few decades with smoking. AHI was the main driver of the "smoking isn't dangerous" pseudoscience.

I'm afraid it's going to work a lot longer with climate change.

Maybe. But the reality is that a significant majority of Americans accept that man-made climate change is real, and a lot of the most important changes that need to be made are starting to be driven by economics, rather than political policy (like the shift away from fossil fuels for power generation).

[geckzilla]

If I've learned anything over the past year, it's that it doesn't matter what the majority of Americans think. Policies don't seem to reflect public opinion.

[Chris Peterson]

If I've learned anything over the past year, it's that it doesn't matter what the majority of Americans think. Policies don't seem to reflect public opinion.

Policies don't need to if policies aren't the driving mechanism of change... which they aren't always.

[geckzilla]

If I've learned anything over the past year, it's that it doesn't matter what the majority of Americans think. Policies don't seem to reflect public opinion.

Policies don't need to if policies aren't the driving mechanism of change... which they aren't always.

It certainly doesn't help that coal gets incentives and alternatives get ... ??? It's all an image campaign. It makes us feel nice to see solar panels on roofs and wind turbines here and there, but we're still running on coal and oil.

[Fred the Cat]

Just like every point on a plane is encompassed within the next dimension up, the fourth dimension should hold every point of our three-dimensional world and much, much more. Perhaps that happens when time is added but it seems to me it would not fully describe that definition. The quantum world, in many ways, describes life; once a choice is made all future choices are a function of that choice and there is no going back.

Is measurement choice? Perhaps gravity is our connection to a dimension we can’t sense. Like today’s ADOD – fun to think about.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cr ... 99t-hooft/ Sorry. This link to "choice" may not work well.

[dergolem]

This is the first APOD I've come across in a long time that I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around.
May I ask clarification on something?

In the description, this phrase: "...the information held by a black hole..."
When the word "information" is used, in this context, to what does it refer? I'm sure I'm not asking the question correctly, but information has a different meaning depending on the discipline using it.

Thank you in advance for your help.

[Chris Peterson]

If I've learned anything over the past year, it's that it doesn't matter what the majority of Americans think. Policies don't seem to reflect public opinion.

Policies don't need to if policies aren't the driving mechanism of change... which they aren't always.

It certainly doesn't help that coal gets incentives and alternatives get ... ??? It's all an image campaign. It makes us feel nice to see solar panels on roofs and wind turbines here and there, but we're still running on coal and oil.

We are, but that's changing quickly. Solar power alone employs more than five times the number working for the entire fossil fuel industry in the U.S., and renewables are the only growing segment of the power generation industry. That's not going to change, no matter what happens with policy. Coal is dead. Natural gas is in a short-term boom, but isn't growing. Wind and sun are taking off.

[Chris Peterson]

This is the first APOD I've come across in a long time that I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around.
May I ask clarification on something?

In the description, this phrase: "...the information held by a black hole..."
When the word "information" is used, in this context, to what does it refer? I'm sure I'm not asking the question correctly, but information has a different meaning depending on the discipline using it.

Yours is not an easy question to answer. There are entire textbooks on the subject! And it's an area of science and math that is still evolving. At its most basic, information in physics might be thought of as all of the details that describe some system. So in the black hole example, all of the particles that have entered the black hole have physical properties like velocity, momentum, spin, and others. These properties represent information, and that doesn't seem like it should change just because the particles are now part of a black hole.

From a physics standpoint, consider some closed system (a volume of space, perhaps). If you were to measure every property of every point in that space, that would be the total information content. Classical information theory could be invoked if you then symbolically encoded that data in some way.