Gravity Seems Holographic. What Does That Mean for Reality?
by ibobev on 9/25/2026, 3:31:02 PM
https://www.quantamagazine.org/gravity-seems-holographic-what-does-that-mean-for-reality-20260925/
Comments
by: haitchfivee
My nitpick is with something the author said in passing about Hawking. Yes, around 1970 Hawking and the scientific community at large still used to believe nothing could escape a black hole, and between 1971 and 1973 Hawking along with Penrose and others expanded their evolving understanding and consequences of of Albert Einstein's breakthrough work.<p>But then Hawking argued back the opposite case, which in simple terms means that some things can, indeed, escape an event horizon. In fact, name dropping Hawking just to mention his views as they stood before his 1973 work, and his 1974 model of Hawking radiation seems dangerously incomplete journalistic reporting.<p>In 1974 Hawking formulated what we now know as Hawking Radiation, which is the *exact opposite* of what was previously believed about the impossibility of anything coming back from a black hole. Whilst still not conclusively proven as a physical fact, this did win him the Special Fundamental Physics Prize in 2013. specifically for his discovery of Hawking radiation from black holes and his deep contributions to quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe.
9/25/2026, 4:42:04 PM
by: phailhaus
> Holography implies that you can do that — reconstruct every fold, vessel, and neuron in three dimensions — without actually looking inside. Simply photographing the surface of the brain somehow suffices.<p>Gah I am not a fan of pop-sci simplifications like this for the sake of a soundbite. The author goes onto explain how no, a picture is <i>not</i> enough, you need to actually measure the distortion of spacetime at the surface. Somebody is going to walk away thinking this stuff is possible, that maybe psychics really can detect something wrong with them.
9/25/2026, 4:23:09 PM
by: glenstein
As a non expert who's just curious about science but also tries to talk like a normal person, from what I can tell holography really seems like it's now the leading candidate to be the next big conceptual revolution in physics.<p>There's not necessarily any breakthrough right around the corner and we shouldn't rush to coronation preemptively, but there's a lot of physics "voting with their feet" for holography as the article says, and I think it's officially time to start getting hyped. It could have sanity-restoring answers to questions of quantum weirdness, albeit at the rather expensive cost of giving up even more on our day to day intuitions about space and time in favor of an apparently informational substrate.<p>String theory had a generation of great science communicators writing its books and singing its praises, but holography doesn't yet have equivalent public champions, and I hope that's something that changes sooner than later.
9/25/2026, 4:10:38 PM
by: hughw
When I read "But holography really starts to bite only after..." my LLM-dar goes off. Everything I read up to that point was comprehensible, but man, I have developed a <i>shudder</i> reaction to any language suggesting AI was involved ibn its creation.
9/25/2026, 4:34:33 PM
by: toddmorey
Aside: Quanta magazine always has excellent design & visuals.
9/25/2026, 4:57:39 PM
by: GodelNumbering
This reads like someone asked the LLM to write an article with "but write in first person". There are factual errors, wrong definitions, misleading intuitions. Entropy is not a "measure of how much stuff fits inside an object”, gravity does not allow you to "infer the one real arrangement of stuff inside from the warping of space-time at the surface of your box" (many different configurations will measure the same on the surface), De Sitter space do have “boundary surface” (at past/future infinity).<p>For a scientific article, I would expect a lot better, and you'll probably have a better learning experience talking to a frontier llm
9/25/2026, 4:43:41 PM
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9/25/2026, 4:19:55 PM
by: jumploops
> “You can ‘compress all of the three-dimensional world into two dimensions.’”<p>Would this imply that time is the third dimension?
9/25/2026, 4:46:24 PM
by: ck2
PBS Space Time, could watch it all day, sometimes listen in the background all day<p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoCYY9sa2kU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoCYY9sa2kU</a><p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klpDHn8viX8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klpDHn8viX8</a><p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYSKEbd956M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYSKEbd956M</a><p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNEBhwimJWs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNEBhwimJWs</a>
9/25/2026, 4:40:01 PM
by: Razengan
<Layperson><p>Just as acceleration through space causes [the same effect as] gravity, could regular gravity be the movement through TIME?<p>Could gravity be a facet of time as electricity is to magnetism and vice versa? and the reason we cannot "isolate" gravity is because it's interwoven with time?<p>But then it would be weird that photos who don't experience time are affected by gravity..<p>Or maybe space, time and gravity are a trinity?<p>(no I'm not high, but maybe I should be)
9/25/2026, 4:31:36 PM
by: yepyoukno
Gravity is half spin hyperdimensional vector torsion. I have decided to accept “half spin torsion” as “vortex” and see gravity as the torsion interference along a G <timespace> dimensionality.<p>There are other dimensionality!<p>The dimensions are like origami, not parallel universes, however the relationships are as though such (all origami pieces then hyperdimensionality relate.)<p>If we call the underlying “universal potential” and whatever we think our universe as, is a plane for hyperdimensional coordinates, much of this will begin to make sense.<p>Gravity (and space time) is a “universal field” that “falls” Around the distributed mass (vector torsions of mass particles) and mass particles are universal potential (same stuff as measured energy in a photon) is half spin vector locked discrete amounts.<p>Sub-atomic particles may then be discrete spin lock configurations and not distinct in any other way.<p>This would make the Higgs particle a lie, and the Higgs field this deformation of gravitational surface area.<p>Just what I’ve come up with. Existential reality (universal potential distributing) is holographic and gravity is half spin vector torsion on a plane of universal existence.
9/25/2026, 3:46:32 PM