SANTA BARBARA, Calif., April 1 (UPI) -- The basic building blocks of nature may not be atoms, quarks and strings but quantum bits -- ultra small packets of pure information, top physics researchers say.
"There must be a law of physics that tells us how space-time geometry, and the distribution of matter in it, arise from pure, underlying information," University of California, Santa Barbara physicist Raphael Bousso told United Press International.
String theory suggests that one-dimensional strings vibrating in myriad ways describe space, time and matter. If bits of information tell the strings how to vibrate, those bits may be more fundamental than the subatomic strings they encode.
The Big Bang, which most scientists believe gave birth to matter and space-time, may then have more in common with a supercomputer downloading gigabytes of information than a giant exploding bomb.
"Roughly speaking, the pattern on the sky left over from the Big Bang might be pixelated like an image on your computer screen, a sign that it is not a continuous image," University of Washington astrophysicist Craig Hogan told UPI from Seattle. "We can hope for signs of this discreteness in data from the cosmic microwave background," radiation left over from the moment of creation.
Information specifies the when, where, why, how and how much of space, time and matter. In an equation, a variable that describes information specifies not only how much matter, for instance, but when the matter appeared, how it moves and how it may change and evolve. Information describes everything, and may be the variable of choice in the equations of a "theory of everything."
A strong candidate for this theory, Bousso believes, is the so-called "Holographic Principle," a remarkable discovery by Nobel laureate Gerard t'Hooft and Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind that Bousso has championed and refined.
The Holographic Principle states mathematically a simple yet astounding detail: The universe acts like a hologram at a level more fundamental than time and space -- the level of pure information.
"The holographic principle tells us how much data -- think bits and bytes -- I need to tell you in complete gory detail every single thing that's going on in any region of space," Bousso said. "The theory involves only information."
A hologram is a laser-generated photograph that appears three dimensional. It contains all the information about a 3-D object in a flat, 2-D region. A hologram has another remarkable property -- every part contains every bit of information specified by the whole.
If a hologram of a frog is cut in half, each half shows the entire image of the frog. Divide the halves again and the frog remains intact.
Further divisions produce the same intact frog up to a point -- an indivisible quantum information "tile" defined by the Holographic Principle. Divide the hologram into tiles smaller than the so-called "Planck area" -- nearly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a square centimeter -- and the Holographic Principle says you will finally lose the original image of the frog.
The Holographic Principle specifies a smallest indivisible unit of information, likening bits to photons, the smallest indivisible units of light. It also says information comes in tiles that cover an object's surface area rather than bundles that fill its volume, a much larger region.
All the information about any 3-D object -- all the digital zeroes and ones needed to fully describe it -- will fit entirely on the 2-D boundary or surface of the object, greatly reducing the amount of information physicists will need to specify a theory that describes everything.
Somehow, nature can reproduce three dimensions in two, just like a hologram reproduces a 3-D frog in a 2-D photograph.
Remarkable scientific and philosophical implications spring from the Holographic Principle. London physicist David Bohm first suggested the universe might be a giant hologram a decade before t'Hooft and Susskind formulated the idea's first scientific expression.
Bohm suggested that at some deeper level of reality, everything in the universe, including the past, present and future, was infinitely interconnected. Telepathy, the "sixth sense" hypnosis and dreams merely were ways humans accessed this information level, which seemed to "tell all."
Bohm's "universal hologram" explained such eternal mysteries as how a divine creator could be in all places at once, a cinch if -- like the holographic frog -- all the information in the vast universe were also contained in a much smaller, more accessible portion.
Accessing the "Planck-tiled" information floor that may be the foundation of nature excites physicists such as Raphael Bousso, who have searched for a theory that would unite all natural phenomena since James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism in 1873.
"We don't yet know the complete unified theory of everything," Bousso said. "But we're ahead in the game because the Holographic Principle tells us how much data the world actually contains."
(Reported by Mike Martin in Columbia, Mo.)
