In November 1997, a young physicist named Juan Maldacena proposed a ridiculously bold idea. Holograms are the backdrop against which space-time, the structure of the universe, and apparently reality unfold.
For many people working in particle physics and gravity at the time, Maldacena’s proposal was both original and surprising. Before it was published, the concept of the holographic universe was “out there,” he said. Ed Witten, a mathematical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey (IAS). “I would have described it as wild speculation.”
Nevertheless, today, more than 25 years later, the Holographic Universe is widely revered as one of the most important breakthroughs of the last few decades. The reason is to challenge the mystery of quantum gravity, the long-sought unification between quantum physics, which governs particles and their interactions, and general relativity, which casts gravity as a product of warped spacetime. .
Again, it remains a mathematical speculation, unproven, and given that the model universe to which it applies has a strange geometry that bears no resemblance to ours, why this You may wonder why the idea is so highly regarded.
There are two answers. First, the holographic conjecture helped us understand otherwise intractable problems in particle physics and black holes. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, physicists have finally started to make strides in their attempts to demonstrate that the holographic principles apply to the universe we actually live in.
Maldacena, now also with the IAS, was originally inspired by two separate chapters.
