The universe is just a big hologram.

The researchers suggest that they found evidence that the universe was once a hologram. The idea is not new, but revives today the debate of the "holographic principle".

For decades physicists have cherished the idea that our Universe is - or was one day - a gigantic hologram where the laws of physics applied only in two dimensions. The idea is back on the table today. A team of British, Canadian and Italian researchers believes that the first evidence of observation is that our primitive Universe was once a hologram. These works published in the journal Physical Review Letters do not suggest that we live in a hologram at this time, but rather that in the early stages of the Universe - a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang - the Universe was Projected in three dimensions from a two-dimensional hologram.

The holographic universe evoked in the 90s suggests that a mathematical description of the universe actually requires one dimension less than it appears. All the information that creates our reality today would actually be contained within a two-dimensional surface. Since 1997, more than 10,000 articles have been published on this subject, which is in fact far less crazy than it seems. Professor Kostas Skenderis of the University of Southampton explains, "Imagine that every thing you see, feel or hear in three dimensions emanates from a flat field in two dimensions. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is actually encoded in a two-dimensional surface as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, it is the whole universe that is coded ".

After investigating irregularities in the cosmic diffuse background - the "persistence" of the Big Bang - researchers claim to have found solid evidence to support a holographic explanation of the Universe. According to the accepted scenario of the Big Bang, the chemical reactions carried out caused a massive expansion of the Universe which would have swollen almost instantaneously from the first stages. But while most physicists accept the reality of what we call "cosmic inflation," no one is able to determine the exact mechanism responsible for such swelling. The Universe would have evolved more rapidly than the speed of light, passing suddenly from a subatomic size to that of a golf ball.

According to Professor Skenderis, general relativity today explains virtually every thing in the infinitely large, but it has had difficulty understanding the origins and mechanisms at the quantum level. This is why researchers are trying to combine these two physics and the concept of a holographic universe has the potential to reconcile the two. "A smaller system would be compatible with everything we see since the Big Bang," explains Afshordi Mandelbaum who participated in the study.

To advance their proofs, the researchers created a computer model to simulate a holographic universe. In this model, you had a time dimension and two spatial dimensions instead of three. By "feeding" their model with real information about the Universe, including data on cosmic diffuse background, researchers realized that the data fit perfectly. On the other hand, the model was only suitable for a small universe (no wider than ten degrees).

What can we conclude? The researchers say they are still far from proving that our primitive Universe was actually a holographic projection, but the fact that real world observation data could explain some of the missing two-dimensional physics laws means that we Can not reasonably be excluded. So, is there a chance we all live in a hologram right now? "Not quite," replies Afshordi, "the model only applies to the Universe in its infancy." As for knowing how the transition between the two happened, that is another enigma.

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