In which it is shown that the Universe is a hologram….

News story in Nature is here. Papers are here and here.

A bleg to my physicist colleagues for their comments.

Big bang trouble…

The theory that is. From Nature on our parent 4-D “bulk universe” and the 4-D star that underwent gravitational collapse, formed a 4-D black hole, with a 3-D, brane, event horizon that is actually our universe. Nature story here. Orignal arXiv paper here.

There’s a discrepancy though: the microwave background data from telescopes matches the classical Big Bang theory. Still, the new theory is only off by 4%. And it’s intuitively attractive.

Quantum mechanics versus relativity: the perspective of the black hole diving astronaut

Great summary of a raging physics debate, here. And don’t laugh, gedanken experiments like this one have led to very important advances in science before…