Jim Six: Explaining life and the universe

Jim Six By Jim Six South Jersey Newspapers
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on August 28, 2014 at 6:00 AM, updated August 28, 2014 at 6:12 AM

Have you ever pondered the world, the universe, your life?

jim Six Web.jpg 

I remember as teenagers, my pals and I often had deep philosophical discussions about the meaning of life. Yeah, we had plenty of time on our hands back then.

I have delved into philosophy only on a superficial basis, because, frankly, once I start, I get the giggles. Most philosophical thought, as far as I am concerned, is balderdash. 

Which is exactly how I felt one day when I was about 14, when I started to explain to my puberty-impaired pimpled peers that our world was merely a pebble in the shoe of some great giant.

Oh, it was a grand theory, which I will not go into here, since, while grand, it was also pure poppycock.

Which is how I feel after reading a story from the United Kingdom website The Register.

It describes how boffins — now there's a piece of British slang we should adopt; boffin means a scientist, especially one engaged in research — are attempting to determine if our world, our universe, is real or just a hologram.

These folks aren't just talking it out, though. They're conducting an experiment called the Holometer in the National Accelerator Lab.

Supposedly, if someone can make 3D images on your TV, all the information about the universe could be packed into just two dimensions.

(Already I question this. I think 3D images do not exist in a vacuum. Because of the way my eyes are situated, 3D is wasted on me. Not old-fashioned 3D comic books or movies, not new 3D images. So, since I can't SEE these 3D images in three dimensions, do they even exist? Heck, I don't know, I'm just asking.)

So, these researchers continue: If all this information could be, get this, 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom, then ...

Well, this is where I start to giggle uncontrollably, because it moves rapidly from philosophy to quantum physics. They start talking about the theory of uncertainty (something all lovelorn teenagers knew well in my day), the jiggle in the hologram, digitized space bits and the quantum jitter of space, measured by interferometers and beam splitters and …


So, anyway, as I was saying, suppose our world was just a pebble in the shoe of a huge giant?