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The Holographic Principle: Is Reality a Projection? · The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the quart Side Quantum Physics Podcast, an exploration
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality, where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: I want you to do something for me right now.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: If you're driving, obviously keep your hands on the wheel.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: But if you're not, if you're sitting at a desk
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: or on a couch, just reach out and touch the
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: nearest solid object. Yeah, maybe it's your desk, could be
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: your desk, maybe the fabric.
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: On your chair, or even just you know, clap your
• 0:47
  Speaker 3: hands together.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Feel that, exactly, feel that resistance, that solidity. It feels well,
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: it feels real, right, I mean, it feels like it
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: occupies space. It has depth, it has volume. You can
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: move your hand through the air up, left, right, forward, back.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: I mean, we live in a world of three dimensions.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: That is that feels like the most fundamental fact of
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: our existence.
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: It really does. It's the stage, right, the stage where
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: our entire lives play out, where three D creatures we
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: navigate a three D world.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Right. But here's the hook, and I'm going to warn
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: you this is the kind of idea that might make
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: you want to pull the car over, or I don't know,
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: just stare at your hands for an hour.
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: Uh huh.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: What if I told you that this feeling of depth,
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: this this whole sensation of space that we're moving through
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: is a lie.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: Well, lie might be a strong word. Let's maybe call
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: it a compelling illusion.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Okay, a very convincing illusion. What if everything in our universe, gravity, matter, time,
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: the very space between you and me right now? What
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: if it's all just a projection, like we are all
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: just encoded data, just smeared across some distant two dimensional
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: surface at the edge of the cosmos.
• 1:57
  Speaker 3: It sounds like the plot of a sci fi novel
• 1:59
  Speaker 3: or something you'd hear at a college dorm room at
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: three am. Right, But what you're describing is actually one
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: of the most robust, heavily researched, and mathematically significant concepts
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: in modern theoretical physics.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: We are talking about the holographic principle. And I have
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: to admit, when I first saw this topic come up,
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: I thought, Okay, we're finally doing the simulation theory episode,
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: we're doing the matrix right, But this isn't that? Is it?
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: It's different.
• 2:23
  Speaker 3: It touches on similar themes for sure, but no, this
• 2:26
  Speaker 3: isn't about evil robots using us as batteries. This is
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: about the fundamental architecture of reality itself. It's about how
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: the universe stores information.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: And the implications are I mean, they're unsettling, to say
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: the least.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: It challenges everything we think we know about where we are.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: So before we get into the heavy math, and we will,
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: but we'll try to keep it painless. Let's just define
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: the core concept. When we say holographic principle, what are
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: we actually claiming?
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: The core claim is this all of the information that's
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: contained in a volume of space. So imagine a room,
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: a planet, or the entire universe. All of it can
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: be completely one described by data that lives on the
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: boundary of that region, a.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Boundary like the shell bricked the surface area.
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: So to use the analogy that gives this principle its name, Yeah,
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: it's like a hologram. I feel like we have to
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: be careful with that word, because when I hear hologram,
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: I think of you know, Tupocket Coachella, right right, I
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: think of a ghost shimmering on a stage.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: And that's that's a visual trick using mirrors in light.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: It's not quite the physics definition. A better way to
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: think about it is a security sticker on your credit card.
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: Oh, the little shiny bird or the globe exactly. Now,
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: if you run your finger over that sticker, what do
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: you feel.
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  Speaker 2: It's flat. It's just a piece of class gets two dimensional.
• 3:45
  Speaker 3: Precisely, the physical object is two D. But when light
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: hits it, what do you see?
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: You see depth? You see a little bird floating in
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  Speaker 2: three D space. You can tilt the card and sort
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: of see the side of it.
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  Speaker 3: Right. The reality of the image looks three to men,
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: but all the information that generates that image is just
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  Speaker 3: etched onto a flat two dimensional.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: Surface, And the holographic principle is suggesting that the entire
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: universe might be that credit card sticker in a.
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: Manner of speaking. Yeah, The theory suggests that the three
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  Speaker 3: dimensional world we inhabit, the bulk, as physicists call it,
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  Speaker 3: is a projection of fundamental quantum information that's stored on
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  Speaker 3: a lower dimensional boundary.
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  Speaker 2: Which would mean that space isn't even a fundamental thing.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: It's just emergent. It is like a user interface on
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: a computer screen.
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  Speaker 3: That is the implication, and it forces us to ask
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  Speaker 3: whether here, you know, this room, this planet is really here,
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  Speaker 3: or if the real physics is happening somewhere else on
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  Speaker 3: the edge of the cosmos.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, my brain is already starting to itch, which is
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: that's usually a good sign. We have a massive roadmap
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: ahead of us.
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: Here.
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  Speaker 2: We need to understand where this idea even came from, which,
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: strangely enough, wasn't from studying holograms. It was from studying
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: black holes.
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: Black Holes are the key to this entire story. They
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: always are.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: We have to unpack something called the Maldacina conjecture, which
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: it sounds like a Robert Ludlam thriller, but it's actually
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: the Rosetta stone for this whole theory.
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: It absolutely is.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: We're going to talk about the information paradox, the sort
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: of crime scene that started this whole investigation, and we'll.
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: Get into how this actually solves some of the biggest
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  Speaker 3: problems in physics.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: And then, because we can't help ourselves, we are going
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: to get into the really wild stuff quantum computing, the
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: nature of consciousness and whether our universe is actually just
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: a big error correcting code.
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: It's a fascinating journey. It connects the largest things in
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: the universe black holes, with the smallest things imaginable quantum bits.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: So let's start at the beginning, or I guess let's
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: start in the nineteen nineties, because this theory didn't just
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: prop out of nowhere. It came from a crisis, it did.
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: It came from a conflict. You have to understand. In physics,
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: we basically have two main rule books. We have general relativity,
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: Einstein's masterpiece. It describes big things gravity, stars, galaxies, the
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: shape of space.
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  Speaker 2: And then we have quantum mechanics.
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  Speaker 3: Which describes the small things atoms, particles, information, And usually
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: these two rule books they just ignore each other. They
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: stay in their own lanes. But in a black hole
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: they crash. They crash hard. In a black hole, you
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: have a massive amount of gravity that's general relativity, crucking
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: things down to a tiny microscopic point that's quantum mechanics.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: So you have to use bose rule books at the
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: same time.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: You have to, and when physicists tried to do that
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: back in the nineties, the math just started screaming.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: At them, and they were specifically looking at entropy. Right now,
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: entropy is one of those words that gets thrown around
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: a lot. Usually people say it means disorder, like my
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: messy desk has high entropy.
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  Speaker 3: That's the casual definition. Yeah, But in information theory, entropy
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  Speaker 3: is much more precise. It's a measure of hidden information.
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  Speaker 3: It's the number of distinct micro states or configurations that
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  Speaker 3: a system can have.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, let's dumb that down a little. Micro states.
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  Speaker 3: Think of it as the number of yes, no questions
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  Speaker 3: you'd need to ask to fully describe a system down
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  Speaker 3: to the very last atom. It's a measure of how
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: much data is inside. Got it.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about a library. I love libraries. If
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: I want to know how much information fits in a library,
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  Speaker 2: what do I look at?
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: Well, intuitively, you look at the volume of the room,
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  Speaker 3: the size of the space inside.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 2: If I have a library that's say a thousand cubic feet,
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  Speaker 2: I can fit x number of books. If I build
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  Speaker 2: a new library that is two thousand cubic feet, double
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  Speaker 2: the volume, I can fit double the books exactly.
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  Speaker 3: That's our common sense. It's called extensive scaling. The amount
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: of stuff you can pack into a region depends on
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  Speaker 3: the volume of that region. It's cubed.
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  Speaker 2: It's cubed.
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: Right. If you double the radius of a sphere, the
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: volume goes up by a factor of eight. So you
• 7:42
  Speaker 3: should be able to fit eight times as much information inside.
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  Speaker 2: Right, Because we live in a three D world which
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: would be able to stack data in three D, we
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: should be able to fill every little cubic inch of
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  Speaker 2: space with a hard drive or something.
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  Speaker 3: That is what everyone assumed until they looked at black holes.
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  Speaker 2: And this is where Ard Hoofed and Leonard Suskan come in.
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  Speaker 3: The fathers of the holographic principle. They, along with Jacob
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  Speaker 3: Bekenstein before them, realize something that just it violated all
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  Speaker 3: that common sense. They found that if you want to
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  Speaker 3: measure the maximum amount of entropy, the maxim amount of
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  Speaker 3: information you can stuff into a region of space, you
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  Speaker 3: don't look at the volume.
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  Speaker 2: You don't know.
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  Speaker 3: You look at the surface area.
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  Speaker 2: Wait, hold on, So it doesn't matter how big the
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  Speaker 2: inside is, It only matters how much surface area the
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: skin has.
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  Speaker 3: Correct, the limit on information is in cubic it's squared.
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  Speaker 2: So back to the library.
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  Speaker 3: Okay, back to the library. Imagine you're trying to pack
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  Speaker 3: it with books. You just keep shoving books in Eventually
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: gravity takes over and that library collapses into a black hole.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so now I have a black hole library.
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  Speaker 3: Right, And if you calculate how much information is hidden
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: inside that black hole, the math tells you do not
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  Speaker 3: count the interior, count the square inches of the event horizon.
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  Speaker 3: The capacity is determined by the walls, not by the room.
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  Speaker 2: That feels wrong. That feels deeply fundamentally wrong.
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  Speaker 3: It feels wrong because it violates our entire intuition about dimensions.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, think about it this way. Imagine you have
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: a box of pingpong balls. You want to know how
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: many balls fit in the box. You'd assume it depends
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: on how deep the box.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: Is, right, Yeah, of course I can snack them layers
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: and layers of balls.
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: But the black hole mat says no, The maximum number
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: of balls you can fit is actually determined by how
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: many circles you can draw on the lid of the box.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: So if I make the box deeper, but I keep
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: the lid the same size, I can't add any more
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: balls effectively.
• 9:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, if you try to add more, the physics breaks.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: The region would have to collapse or expand the limit
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: is always the surface area. This was known as the
• 9:43
  Speaker 3: Baconstein Bound.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: The Baconstein Bound, It really does sound like a spy
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: movie title. The Baconstein Bound taffles.
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  Speaker 3: It is one of the most profound discoveries in physics.
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  Speaker 3: It tells us that the resolution of the universe is finite,
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  Speaker 3: and more importantly, it suggests that the fundamental pixels of reality,
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: the smallest possible units of information, are tiling the surface,
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: not filling the volume.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: Let's pause on that pixel idea for a second, because
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: if we're talking about a three D world, we'd usually
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: talk about voxels, right.
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: Three D pixels like in Minecraft.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, everything is made of little cubes, right.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: If the universe were truly fundamentally three D all the
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: way down, it would be made of vouxles. But the
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: Beckenstein Bound says that at the most fundamental level, the
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: Plank scale, the universe behaves like it's made of pixels
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: on a two D sheet.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: So this was the first breadcrumb the universe sort of
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: whispering to us, Hey, you think the important stuff is
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: inside the volume, but the accounting, the real ledger is
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: kept on the walls.
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: Exactly. And if the maximum amount of information in any
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: volume of space is determined by its boundary. Then maybe,
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: just maybe the interior isn't the fundamental thing. Maybe the
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: interior is just a projection of the data on the boundary.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: It's like discovering that the book you're reading isn't a
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: story about a world, but just a really really complex index.
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: For the world, or that the room you're standing in
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: is just a very convincing hologram. Yeah, but for a
• 11:04
  Speaker 3: few years, this was just a weird observation about black holes.
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: It was a suspicion. It wasn't a full blown.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: Theory until nineteen ninety seven.
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: Until nineteen ninety seven.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Enter Juan Maldasena, the man who changed everything. So Meldasena
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: comes along and he doesn't just say, hey, you know,
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: maybe the universe is a hologram. He actually builds a
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: mathematical model that shows it works.
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: He provided the first concrete mathematical realization of the holographic principle.
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: It's called the ad CFT correspondence.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: Okay, add SCFT. I see this acronym everywhere in the research.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: It looks like a license plate number or maybe a
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: bad Wi Fi password chuckles.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: It's certainly I'm mouthful. Most physicists just called the Maldasina conjecture,
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: or sometimes just the duality.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: We need to unpack this because all the sources say
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: this is the Rosetta stone. If we can get our
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: heads around this, we get the whole theory. So let's
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: break it down. Ad s anti desitter space.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: Right, So ad S refers to the bulk the inside
• 11:59
  Speaker 3: of things.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: Antiit a sitter sounds like a villain. I am antidasitter.
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: It does sound a bit ominous, yeah, but it just
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: describes as specific geometry of space. Now I'm going to
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: need you to do some mental gymnastics with me here.
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: Forget our universe for a second. Forget the expanding cosmos
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: we see through telescopes. Maldosina built a toy universe, a model.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: Okay, I'm with you. I'm in the toy universe. What's
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: it like?
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: Imagine a can of soup. A can of soup, Okay,
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: simple can of suit. The ad S part the anti
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: de Sitter space. That's the soup. It's the volume inside
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: the can. It has three dimensions height with depth, it
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: has gravity, it has black holes floating around the broth,
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: it has stars. It's a dynamic three D world.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: Okay, So I'm swimming in the soup, I feel gravity,
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: I see three D objects.
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: All good, exactly. Now, there's one very weird thing about
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: this soup. It has what we call negative curvature.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: Negative curvature, What does that mean visually? What does that
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: look like?
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: Have you ever seen those Esher drawings the circle limit
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: ones with the angels.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: And demons, Yes, where they're all interlocking, and as they
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: get closer to the edge of the circle, they get
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: smaller and smaller and smaller.
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: And they seem to go on forever towards the edge,
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: but they never quite touch it.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: That is a two D representation of hyperbolic geometry or
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: negative curvature in Antidecitter space. Space itself is warped like that,
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: like a funhouse mirror version of a universe. But the
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: key thing is it has a boundary, It has an edge.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: The label on the soup can the.
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: Label on the soup can that is the boundary. And
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: that brings us to the second half of the acronym.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: CFT conformal field theory.
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: Right, this is the theory that lives on the label.
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: Now here's the crucial difference. The soup the edds space
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: because gravity the label. The CFT does not have gravity,
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: no gravity on the label, none whatsoever. It is just
• 13:46
  Speaker 3: a flat surface with quantum particles buzzing around, interacting with
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: each other. It's a standard quantum field theory, like the
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: ones we use to describe electromagnetism.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: So we have two totally different worlds. Here we have
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: the soup three D gravity black holes, and we have
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: the label two D no gravity, just particles.
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: And here is Maldasine's genius. He proved mathematically that these
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: two theories are equivalent. They are duels of each other equivalent.
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: How can a three D gravitational world be equivalent to
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: a two D flat one.
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: It means that every single thing that happens in the
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: soup has a direct, perfect translation to something happening on
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: the label.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: So if I drop a little rock into the soup.
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: That corresponds to a specific ripple of particles on the label.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: And if a black hole forms in the soup.
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: That corresponds to a specific temperature rising in the particles
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: on the label, a specific thermal state.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: So it's a dictionary.
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: It is a perfect dictionary. You can translate any sentence
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: from soup language, which is gravity, into label language, which
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: is quantum fields. And this is why physicists went absolutely
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: nuts for it, because sometimes the math in the soup
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: is just it's impossible.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: Ever ready is hard.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: Gravity's notoriously hard. The equations get incredibly messy. Yeah, but
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: using the dictionary, you can translate that hard gravity problem
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: onto the label. Suddenly it becomes a quantum particle problem,
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: which might be much easier to solve. Oh wow, you
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: solve it there, get the answer, and then you translate
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: it back to the soup.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: It's a cheat code.
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: It is the ultimate cheat code for physics. It's a
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: concept called strong weak duality. When gravity is strong and
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: complicated in the bulk, the interactions on the boundary are
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: simple and weak, and vice versa.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: So even if the holographic principle isn't real in some
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: philosophical sense, even if we aren't literally living on a wall,
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: this tool is so useful that physicists use it every day.
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: Oh absolutely. It is revolutionized string theory, nuclear physics, condensed
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: matter physics. Yeah, and it's a workhorse. But the question
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: we're asking today isn't just is it useful, it's is
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: it true?
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: Right? Is the soup real? Or is the label real exactly,
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: because if Maldacina is right, and the boundary contains all
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: the information of the bulk, then the bulk is technically redundant.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: You don't need the three D space to explain the universe.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: The two space on the label does it perfectly. Well.
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: That's the existential crisis right there. If the two D
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: theory is complete, then the three D world is just
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: a projection. It's an emergent phenomenon, a hologram.
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: I need to sit with the soup cam universe for
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: a second, because this model, this duality, it actually helped
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: solve a crime, a cosmic crime involving Stephen.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: Hawking, the information paradox.
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: The information paradox. This is the Sherlock Holms moment of
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: the whole story, because for a long time physics had
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: this gaping hole in it, a murder mystery where the
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: victim was information.
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: Itself and Stephen Hawking was the prime suspect.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: Set the scene for us. What did Hawking do well?
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: Back in the seventies, Hawking made a startling discovery about
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: black holes. Before him, we thought black holes were just
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: these eternal prisons. Nothing ever gets at.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: The ultimate roach motel. Things check in, but they don't
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: check out right.
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: But Hawking applied quantum mechanics to the very edge of
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: the black hole, the event horizon, and he realized that,
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: due to quantum fluctuations, black holes should actually emit radiation.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: They should glow very faintly.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: This is Hawking radiation. How does that work?
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: Very briefly, Okay, very briefly. In empty quantum space, pairs
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: of virtual particles are constantly popping into existence, a particle
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: and an antiparticle. Usually they just annihilate each other and vanish.
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: But if they pop up right on the edge of
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: a black hole, one falls in and the other one escapes.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: The one that escapes becomes real radiation. The one that
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: falls in effectively subtracts a tiny bit of energy from
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: the black hole.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: So the black hole is losing weight. It's on a diet, a.
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: Very very slow diet. And if you wait long enough,
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: trillions and trillions and trillions of years, the black hole
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: will radiate away all of its mass and hoof disappear.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: Okay, the black hole dies. Why is that a paradox?
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: Why is that a crisis for physics.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: Because of what fell inside? Imagine you take your diary.
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: It has your secrets, your memories, all this unique information.
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: You throw it into a black hole.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: Bye bye diary. My secrets are safe now you.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: Wait a trillion years. The black hole evaporates, it turns
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: into this Hawking radiation. But here's the thing. Hawking's calculation
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: showed that this radiation is random, it's thermal, it's just heat.
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: It doesn't contain the text of your diary.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: The diary is gone.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: If the black hole disappears and the radiation coming out
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: doesn't have the data, then yes, the information has been
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: permanently deleted from the universe.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: And I'm guessing physicists don't like deleting things.
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: They hate it. It breaks a fundamental rule of quantum
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: mechanics called unitarity. In quantum mechanics, information is immortal. You
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: can scramble it like you can burn a book into ash,
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: But in principle, if you collected all the ash and
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: smoke and light, you could reconstruct the book. Information is
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: never truly lost.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: But Hawking was saying, Nope, in a black hole, it
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: eyes lost exactly.
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: He said black holes are cosmic erasers, and if that's true,
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: then quantum mechanics is wrong. Physics is broken. The past
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: doesn't determine the future. It was a complete disaster.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: It was the black hole war Suskan versus Hawking.
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: For decades, nobody knew who was right until the holographic
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: principle came in as the peacekeeper.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: So how does the hologram save the diary?
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: Remember the soup can remember the duality. The three D
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: black hole in the soup where the diary fell in
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: is completely equivalent to the two D label the quanda
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: field theory. We know for a fact, with one hundred
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: percent certainty that the theory on the label is unitary.
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: It never ever loses information. It's a standard quantum system.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: It plays by the rules.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: So if the label can't possibly lose the.
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: Diary, then the soup can't lose it either, because they
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: are the same system, just viewed in two different ways.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: The information must be preserved.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: So Hawking was wrong.
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: He eventually conceded. He famously admitted he was wrong. The
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: consensus now is that the information isn't lost. It gets
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: encoded into the outgoing radiation in a highly complex, scrambled way, So.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: The diary doesn't disappear, It just gets turned into the
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: most complicated barcode in the entire universe.
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: That's a perfect way to put it. From the respective
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: of the holographic principle, the information that falls into the
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: black hole is effectively smeared out and stored on the boundary.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: It never truly leaves the system.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: That is a relief, I guess. I mean, I don't
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: want my diary red, but I definitely don't want it
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: to break all the laws of physics.
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: Copples. It saves physics, yeah, but it does so at
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: a cost, and the cost is accepting that location is
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: an illusion. The diary isn't really inside the hole. It's
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: painted on the horizon.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: And this leads us to the part of the whole
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: discussion that I find the most well, the most mind bending,
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: because if the boundary is the thing that follows the
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: rules and the bulk is the thing that gives us illusions,
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: then space itself isn't real.
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: Space is emergent. That is the phrase you'll hear physicists
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: use over and over.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: Emergent. Okay, let's unpack that word.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: Think about wetness. You have a single water molecule. Is
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: that molecule wet?
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: No, it's just h two. Oh, it's just hydrogen and
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: oxygen atoms.
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: Wetness is a property that emerges when you have billions
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: and billions of them all sloshing around together. Or think
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: about heat. Heat isn't the thing in itself, it's just
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: the average motion of atoms.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: So you're saying space, the distance between my nose and
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: this microphone is like heat. It's not a fundamental thing.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: It's just what happens when well when what happens.
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: When quantum information gets entangled?
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: Entanglement the spooky action at a distance.
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: Yes, there is a growing movement in physics, an idea
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: called it from quibbit. The idea is that the fundamental
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: building block of reality is the quibbit, a unit of
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: quantum information, and space is the geometry that emerges from
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: the entanglement of those quibbots.
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: Explain that to me, how does entanglement create distance?
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: Okay, so imagine two points on the boundary on our
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: soup can label. If the information at those two points
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: is highly entangled, meaning their quantum states are deeply linked,
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: they effectively pull the corresponding regions in the bulk together.
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: They create a sort of shortcut through the.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: Bulk, a wormhole.
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: It's called Einstein, rosenbridge or wormhole. Yes, is what we
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: perceive as closeness.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: So I am sitting next to you right now, not
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: because we are physically close and some fundamental container, but
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: because the quibits that represent us on the boundary are
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: really really entangled.
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: That's the hypothesis. Distance is a measure of entanglement. If
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: you could somehow cut the entanglement between two regions on
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: the boundary, the space between them in the bulk would
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: literally snap the choma. You would fall apart.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: That is a terrifying thought. It means the fabric of
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: reality is just it's just correlations in data.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: It leads to this concept called entanglement wedges.
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: Which sounds like a terrible appetizer at a restaurant.
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: Cuckles, I'll have the entanglement wedges with a side of
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: quantum ranch.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: No. It just means that specific chunks of spacetime, specific
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: wedges of the bulk, are generated by specific corresponding chunks
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: of data on the boundary. You can map exactly which
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: part of the hologram is responsible for creating which part
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: of the room you're in.
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: This makes me think of a video game. I play
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: a lot of these big open world games.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy.
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: When I'm playing, I see a mountain way off in
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: the distance, I can walk to it. It feels like
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: three D space. But in reality, on the hard drive,
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: the data for Mountain A and Mountain B might be
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: on completely different sectors of the disc. They aren't next
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: to each other on the chip at.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: All, exactly, they are linked by pointers by code.
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: So the three D world of the game is emergent.
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: It's being rendered in real time precisely. The two D
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: surface of the ship is the reality. The three D
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: world of the game is the projection. And just like
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: in the game, if the code gets corrupted, the mountain
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: might just disappear or the ground might fall up from
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: under you.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: So we're sims. We're just very very high resolution sims.
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: We might be, but instead of a hard drive, the
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: chip is the boundary of the universe, and the code
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: is quantum entanglement.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: Okay, So if we accept this that we are in
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: the rendered environment, we have to ask about the hardware.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: We talked about the soup Can universe, but as you mentioned,
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: that was a toy universe.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: The anti desitter space.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: But we don't live in a soup can. Our universe
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: is expanding.
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: We live in what's called desitter space. There's something very
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: close to it. It has a positive curvature.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: So does any of this actually apply to us? Or
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: is this just a really cool theory for a universe
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: that doesn't actually exist.
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: This is the biggest criticism. This is the Achilles heel
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: of the theory. Right now, the math works beautifully and
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: perfectly in the soup can in ads space. It is
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: much much harder to make it work in our universe
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: in desitter space.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: Why what's the main difference?
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: The boundary In the soup can, the boundary is a
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: clear hard wall. It acts like a perfect mirror. Light
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: hits it and bounces back in a perfect static container.
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: In our universe, well, we're expanding. We don't have a
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: hard wall at the edge.
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: So where is our label? Where is our screen?
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: That's the multi trillion dollar question. Some physicists think the
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: screen might be the cosmic horizon.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: The edge of the observable universe.
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: Right, if you look as far as you can in
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: any direction, you eventually hit a point where from beyond
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: hasn't had time to reach us yet. That horizon surrounds us.
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: Some propose that this horizon could act as our holographic screen.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: So the edge of what we can see is the
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: hard drive and everything inside, all the galaxies stars us
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: is the projection inward from that screen.
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: That is one possibility. It's a model called DSCFT the
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: Sitter CFT, but the math is much much messier. However,
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: the Bekenstein bound, that fundamental limit on entropy, it seems
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: to hold true regardless of the shape of the universe,
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: so the core principle is likely correct, even if the
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: screen is harder for us to defind.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: This actually touches on something else I saw in the
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: research quantum computing. I saw a note about error correcting codes,
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: and this felt like the most I don't know, the
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: most sci fi part of all of this.
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: It's also the most practical tech part. It turns out
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: the mathematics that makes the holographic principle work is essentially
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: identical to the math we are now using to build
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: fault tolerant quantum computers.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: Explain that connection. What is an error correct?
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: Okay, imagine you have an old DVD. Remember DVDs.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: I'm old enough to remember.
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: Yes, if you get a little scratch on a DVD,
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: does the movie stop working.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: Usually know, unless it's a really deep scratch, it might
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: skip for a second, but it plays through.
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: And why is that? It's because the data on the
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: DVD is redundant. The information for a specific frame of
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: the movie isn't just in one tiny spot. It's spread out.
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: It's encoded in a way that allows the player to
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: fill in the blanks if some of the data is missing. Redundancy,
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: exactly logical redundancy. Now think about the hologram. The information
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: about a single point in the bulk, say a star
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: in the middle of the soup, is spread out all
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: across the boundary. It's smeared out.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: So the star isn't just here on one spot of
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: the boundary, It's encoded everywhere on the boundary.
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: In a sense. Yes, and this is crucial for quantum computers.
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: Quantum data qubits, they're incredibly fragile. If a stray atom
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: or a bit of radiation hits your quibit, the data
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: can be lost. So you have to use these error
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: correcting codes to spread that single piece of logical data
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: out across many physical quibits. If one gets corrupted, the
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: others can reconstruct.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: The whole and the universe is doing this.
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: The math suggests the universe is this. The holographic principle
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: acts like a giant natural error correcting code.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: So space is robust because it's redundant.
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: Yes, if you were to somehow scratch the boundary, if
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: you deleted a chunk of the label, you could still
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: reconstruct the soup in the middle. The bulk is protected
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: by this holographic redundancy.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: That is weirdly comforting and also deeply terrifying. It implies
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: the universe is somehow engineered to preserve information.
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: Or that stability itself requires this structure. The universe that
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: wasn't holographic, that didn't have this built in error correction,
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: might just collapse. Space might just dissolve into nothing. We
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: might be here because the universe is a hologram.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: We are the glitch proof simulation. I like the sound
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: of that.
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: I wouldn't go quite that far, but the parallel is
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: definitely undeniable.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: I want to push into the deep end of the
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: pool for a minute. The speculative territory, because if we
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: are talking about information and error correction and projections, we
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: have to talk about consciousness.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: Ah the C word. Physicists usually hate touching this, but
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: let's do it.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: The source has mentioned it, even just briefly. If reality
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: is emergent, if three D space is just what happens
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: when two D information gets processed in a certain way,
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: does that mean our brains are doing the processing? Are
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: we creating it?
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: Well, there is the whole question of the observer in
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: quantum mechanics, the observer is key. In a hologram. You
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: need a light source, a laser to shine through the
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: film to create the three D.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: Image, So he is shining the light.
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: That's the mystical question. But from a more grounded neuroscience perspective,
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: some people ask, is consciousness just a very high level
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: of information integration if the universe is built on it?
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: From quibbit, is our consciousness just a particularly complex not
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: of those quibbitts processing themselves?
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: And what about AI building these massive neural networks?
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: Now, this is where it gets really fun and really speculative.
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: If three D space emerges from the processing of information,
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: could a sufficiently complex AI develop its own space? If
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: an AI becomes complex enough, if it's internal data becomes
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: entangled enough, could a new dimension emerge inside the AI
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: that we can't see or access.
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: Like it perceives a spatial reality that only exists within
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: its own code.
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: Exactly, just like our spatial reality might just exist within
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: the code that's written on the boundary of the universe.
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: We might be the AI living in the simulation that's
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: being run by the boundary of physics.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Okay, that gives me chills. That is a black mirror
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: episode waiting to happen.
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: It is highly, highly speculative. We have zero proof of this,
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: but the holographic principle opens the door to these kinds
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: of questions because it reduces physics down to information, and
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: information is something we are finally learning to manipulate ourselves before.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: We completely float away into the ether. Here, let's ground
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: this again. We have to be honest with everyone listening.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: Is this theory true with a capital T.
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: That is a very complicated question because.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: There are critics. It's not universally accepted.
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: There are and the biggest criticism is what you could
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: call the math trick argument.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: The idea that it's just a useful calculator, not a
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: description of reality.
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: Right, just because the math allows you to translate the
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: soup to the label doesn't necessarily mean the label is
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: more real.
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: A map of New York is incredibly useful. I can
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: use it to find my way around, but the map
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: isn't the city.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: That's the argument. Some physicists argue that the duality is
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: just a powerful relationship between two mathematical structures. It doesn't
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: mean we physically live on a wall. It just means
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: the wall describes us perfectly.
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: But does the distinction even matter If the description is perfect,
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: if you can predict every single move I make by
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: just looking at the wall, am I not for all
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: intents and purposes on the wall?
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: That's the philosophical counter argument. If it walks like a
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: duck and quacks like a duck, maybe it's a hollo duck.
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: And there was a note about time. We talked about
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: space being emergent. What about time?
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: That is the next great frontier. The time problem. In
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: the bulk in the soup, time flows normally forward, but
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: on the boundary time behaves very differently. It's part of
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: the quantum field itself. Reconciling bulk time with boundary time
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: is extremely difficult.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: So time might be an illusion too.
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: It's very possible that time is also emergent. The past
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: and future are just useful patterns in the entanglement on
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: the boundary.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: Great, just what I needed. Time isn't real, Space isn't real.
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: I'm a credit card sticker chuckles.
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: It's the price of admission for playing with modern physics.
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: So let's bring this home. Let's recap the journey, because
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: we have covered a lot of ground.
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: We started with the library with this bizarre realization that
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: the capacity of the universe is written on the walls,
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: not on the volume.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: The beacon steam bound.
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: We moved to the soup can, the Maldosena conjecture, the
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: mathematical proof that a three D gravitational world can be
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: identical to a two D quantum world.
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: The dictionary, the cheat code.
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: We use that code to solve the information paradox, to
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: save the diary from the black hole by smearing it
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: on the event horizon, and.
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: We ended up with this incredible idea that space itself
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: is stitched together by quantum entanglement, that we are living
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: inside a giant error correcting quantum computer.
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: It really does change how you look at the world.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: It does. It makes me feel lighter, or maybe just
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: less solid.
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: It should make you feel connected. If space is just entanglement.
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: Then connection is the most fundamental building block of reality.
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: We aren't just separate objects floating in a void. We're
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: an interconnected web.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: That's a beautiful way to put it.
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: And remember the Bickenstein bound implies. We are finite. We
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: are complex, yes, but we are limited. We are a
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: finite amount of data that is in a way processing itself.
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: And I want to leave the listener with one final thought,
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: one last provocation.
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: Go for it.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: We keep talking about the screen boundary the hologram, but
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: a hologram is meant to be seen and image is
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: meant to be observed. Yes, if the universe is a projection,
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: who is the audience?
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: What if we are the audience?
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: If we are the code, but we are also the
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: one studying the code.
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: Then the universe is waking up and looking at itself.
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: We are the mechanism by which the hologram understand that
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: it is a hologram.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: That is the ultimate loop.
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: It is.
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: On that note, I think I'm going to go touch
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: my desk again and try to convince myself it's solid.
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: Good luck with that.
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for guiding us through the soup can.
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: This was fascinating, My pleasure. It was fun and to
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: everyone listening. Next time you look up at the night sky,
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: just remember you might be looking at the Ultimate projection Screen.
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on this exploration. We'll see you
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: next time.