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  • What if the Universe is an illusion?

  • What if your reality is not what it seems to be?

  • What if you are you're just a 2D projection

  • stretched on the surface of a black hole?

  • And what does a black hole

  • have to do with all this?

  • This is WHAT IF,

  • and here's what would happen

  • if you lived inside a hologram.

  • I know what you think.

  • This isn't real.

  • How can we live in a hologram

  • if everything around us is three-dimensional?

  • Well, prepare yourself for a big reality check.

  • Because this unified theory can explain everything

  • about the fundamental laws of our existence.

  • We talked about it a little in the episode

  • where a black hole deleted the Universe.

  • You may want to watch that one again.

  • Because, of all places,

  • the holographic principle starts

  • in a black hole.

  • When you eat, say, a bagel,

  • your mass increases by the mass of that bagel.

  • With your mass increased, your volume grows,

  • and so does your surface area.

  • For a black hole, it's different.

  • It's only the surface area,

  • and not the volume, that increases with every bite.

  • It's like the swallowed matter or energy doesn't make it inside the black hole,

  • but rather gets stuck to its surface.

  • Or like if you, instead of eating the bagel,

  • just taped it to the outside of your stomach.

  • Black holes themselves are three-dimensional,

  • but their contents can be projected on their two-dimensional surface.

  • And that gave scientists the idea of the holographic world.

  • You, me, and everything else in the Universe

  • is made up of atoms and molecules.

  • Atoms and molecules are made up of smaller subatomic particles.

  • And those particles, in turn, are made up of something even smaller -

  • the information about their state in time and in space.

  • These particles are so small, that our eyes can't detect them.

  • We just know they're there.

  • And we know they don't answer to the the classical laws of physics.

  • It's up to quantum mechanics to interpret their nature.

  • One of the ways to understand the smallest fundamental particles

  • is through the string theory.

  • The string theory is purely theoretical,

  • and the mathematics behind is complicated.

  • Nobody has ever solved it yet.

  • But maybe, we can change the rules a little bit.

  • If you're trying to solve a complicated problem,

  • you can map all the volume of the Universe across its boundary.

  • Like a hologram.

  • The nature of the problem changes

  • because, for the two-dimensional Universe,

  • we don't need to count quantum gravity in.

  • That turns the nearly impossible-to-crack mathematics of the string theory

  • to maybe-doable equations.

  • It's not a solution yet,

  • just a shortcut to the solution.

  • But once you figure out how to solve it,

  • you can transform the solution into our three-dimensional space.

  • Congratulations, you solved the mystery of the Universe

  • and how it started...

  • through the hologram.

  • But does that mean we ourselves are living inside a hologram?

  • When you take a selfie, you lose some of the information about yourself.

  • When you later look at the picture,

  • you can't see the back of your head.

  • The holograms are designed to preserve all of that information.

  • If you experienced the world in a holographic way,

  • you could look at someone else's skin and tell everything about their organs,

  • what they ate for lunch, even their thoughts.

  • Is it just me, or does that sound creepy?

  • The fundamental laws of our Universe -

  • from black holes, to the smallest particles,

  • to the laws of our reality -

  • could be potentially described

  • with the help of the holographic principle.

  • It doesn't necessarily mean we live inside a hologram.

  • But if we did, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.

  • Maybe time doesn't exist either.

  • But that's a story for another WHAT IF.

What if the Universe is an illusion?

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