Friday, July 19, 2019

The Holographic Universe and the Emergence of Dark Energy

                                                                                                 
           Origin of Dark Energy in a Holographic Universe           July 19th, 2019

      Are We Living in a Hologram?: Mathematical evidence is mounting that we may be living in a holographic universe, where all of the data, or information, that comprises our universe is encoded on a two-dimensional surface of a sphere. In this scenario, all of the events in our world would actually take place on this two-dimensional surface rather than in the three dimensions, which our brains decode and present to us as reality. Recently, new technologies have been developed to test this hypothesis and verify whether the math matches the experimental evidence.


Stanford professor Leonard Susskind, who created a precise string-theory interpretation of the Holographic Principle first proposed by Gerard 't Hooft

     Big Bangs from Black Holes: When I first started reading about black holes, there was one coincidence I noticed which stood out prominently. Physicists called the theorized infinitely dense point at the center of the black hole a "singularity", meaning that its objective reality violated the laws of physics. The only other proposed singularity in cosmology was at the point where the big bang began. It's not much of a brainstorm to "connect the dots" in this case and wonder if both singularities might cancel each other out if they were viewed as the same point. Then, instead of two points in space which violated the laws of physics, you could view their union as a kind of transition between two different dimensions of space-time. In this scenario, every time a black hole forms in space-time, a new universe, or big bang, or "white hole", is created within the black hole. 
     So far the mathematics does not add up for this to be the case. So far. But much remains to be learned about black holes. 
     As I investigated this idea, I found a physicist named Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute who had been one of the first to propose this idea. He suggested that every time a new universe was created inside a black hole, that each new universe might have different kinds of physics. Some would just fizzle out and others would survive and evolve, in a kind of cosmic natural selection. There is a conjectured mathematical constant in physics called "lamda" (I don't believe it is a constant, as I will explain later) which Albert Einstein inserted in his General Theory of Relativity in an attempt to maintain a steady-state universe which would neither expand nor contract. Later, when astronomers discovered that the universe was indeed expanding, Einstein called it his "greatest mistake". But true to Einsteins's genius, it did not turn out to be much of a mistake after all, since the actual value of lamda was found to be an accurate measure of the energy density of space, or vacuum energy, which causes space to expand. This energy which causes space to expand is now called "dark energy", which is currently estimated to make up 68% of the mass/energy density in the universe.


Brian Green's excellent video about vacuum energy or the "fabric" of space

     Recently, while pondering how new universes could be created within black holes, I started wondering if the value of lamda might not be a constant, but might vary, depending upon how much mass and energy the "parent" black hole of the offspring universe might be consuming. It could be that the reason we are living in an expanding universe is that the black hole our universe was created within, is currently feeding on new energy, and that energy is entering our universe and increasing the density of the vacuum energy that is causing space to expand. Perhaps if that black hole stopped feeding, our universe would stop expanding, and maybe even start contracting.
     There are many variables of course in what would happen if a black hole could create a new universe. Would our universe actually lie within the black hole (a serendipitous scenario for a holographic universe)? Or would the energy be compressed down to a point small enough to enter the conjectured  Calabi-Yau manifolds in String Theory and pop up in completely new dimensions?


Calibi-Yau manifolds, which renowned physicist Leonard Susskind has called "the DNA of the universe", may contain an extra 6 spacial dimensions

Furthermore, what would happen to the offspring universes if two black holes merged? What happens inside the super-massive black holes which lie at the center of galaxies? Are there multitudes of different universes created inside them? I have no clue. My math education ended with three-dimensional engineering calculus, but based upon what I do know about math, I believe that the beautiful geometry of String Theory will eventually explain most of how the universe works (see Brian Green's superb video below).


An  excellent video about String Theory with Brian Greene

     So could dark energy, or lamda, be just the influx of new energy from a black hole in a parent universe which is expanding the space in our offspring universe like air in a balloon (a very simplistic analogy)? Does it vary with how much energy the black hole is consuming? Studies of the cosmic background radiation, along with new technologies which are  being developed, will probably answer these questions soon.


Watch this short video on the Holographic Principle if you have not heard of it

     The Holographic Principle: In the holographic Principle, it is conjectured that all of the information that passes into a black hole is spread out and encoded all over the surface of the black hole, as in a hologram.

From Wikipedia (they can explain the principle better than I can): The holographic principle is a tenet of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region—such as a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind[1] who combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn.[1][2] As pointed out by Raphael Bousso,[3] Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way. The prime example of holography is the AdS/CFT correspondence.
The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which conjectures that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole might be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory.[4] However, there exist classical solutions to the Einstein equations that allow values of the entropy larger than those allowed by an area law, hence in principle larger than those of a black hole. These are the so-called "Wheeler's bags of gold". The existence of such solutions conflicts with the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the holographic principle are not fully understood yet.

Click this link to view a recent excellent video from Space's Deepest Secrets which explores the holographic universe: The Holographic Universe

Postscript: I have noticed that, for some reason, Google has not included this page in their search engine, even though I have tried everything I can do to get it included (pages on Blogger are supposed to be automatically crawled since Blogger belongs to Google).  I will post this again soon on my own website.
As far as I can see, I think I must be one of the first to describe dark energy as a result of the emergence of new universes in dark holes and the idea that every time they feed on new energy, this results in an increase in "dark energy" in the offspring universe.  From the perspective of the holographic principle, "dark energy" is just an increase in the surface area of the event horizon surrounding the black hole, with is also the even horizon of the new universe.
Perhaps I shouldn't have dated the entry and there is someone else who needs to have shown that they had this idea earlier, I don't know. The lack of this page's inclusion in Goggle's search engine could also be the result of criticism I have aimed at Google for their "Big Brother" tactics on other blogs. At any rate, I have made certified copies of this original page for future reference.