Black Holes Are Nothing But Holograms, New Study Finds

Black holes are one of the most mysterious objects astronomer have encountered so far.  And a new study proposes that black holes are nothing but just a holographic projection, with a new calculation of the entropy - or also known as disorder. 

These calculations suggest that these giant enigmas of the Universe being nothing but an optical illusion. Holograph hypothesis was first proposed by physicist Leonard Susskind back in the 1990s, according to this theory, mathematically speaking, the Universe requires just two dimensions - not three - for the laws of physics and gravity to work as they really should.

Yeah this sounds crazy, but it could essentially resolve some crucial conflicts between Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Physicists have proposed that the main reason we can’t find out what happens to matter once it passes over the edge - or event horizon - and into a black hole, is because there is actually no 'inside'. As an alternative, everything that passes the edge gets trapped in the gravitational variations on the surface.

A group of physicists led by Daniele Pranzetti from the Max Planck Institute for Theoretical Physics in Germany has now presented a new approximation for the amount of entropy existing in a black hole, and their calculations support this situation.

The physicists were concentrating on the entropy - a physical property that encrypts how ordered, or disordered, something really is. According to Stephen Hawking, the entropy of a black hole must be relative to its area, but not its volume, and this notion is what encouraged the first thoughts about the probability of holographic black holes.

Joanne Kennel explains for The Science Explorer, said "Although there is some consensus in the scientific community that black holes must have entropy or their existence would violate the second law of thermodynamics, no agreement has been reached about the origin of this entropy, or how to calculate its value,"

For a new way of looking at this this problem, Pranzetti and his coworkers used a theoretical method called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) to clarify a concept known as quantum gravity.

In theoretical physics, quantum gravity pursues to explain the force of gravity according to the rules of quantum mechanics, and forecasts that the fabric of space-time consists of tiny grains known as quanta - the 'atoms' of space-time.

Assemblages of these quanta are called condensates, and the physicists discovered that just like a jug full of atoms that make up water molecules, a black hole made of condensates would have all the similar properties, and their mutual behavior and gravitational effects could be resolute by studying the properties of just one.

What this means is that although we can't really see or measure what's inside a black hole's event horizon - and hence its entropy - it doesn't actually matter, if the collective properties of all its 'atoms' can be measured in just one.

The team explains in a press release "[J]ust as fluids at our scale appear as continuous materials despite their consisting of a huge number of atoms, similarly, in quantum gravity, the fundamental constituent atoms of space form a sort of fluid, that is continuous space-time. A continuous and homogenous geometry (like that of a spherically symmetric black hole) can ... be described as a condensate."

Now, think of a black hole as a three-dimensional basketball ring – consider the ring as the event horizon, and the net is the hole into which all matter foes and vanishes. Shove that net up into the ring to create it a flat, two-dimensional circle, and then visualize that all that metal and string is made of water. Now everything you measure in the ring can be applied to what's in the net.

With this in mind, now have a real model to show that the 3D nature of black holes might just be an illusion - all the information of a black hole can hypothetically be confined on a two-dimensional surface, with no need for an real 'hole' or inside.

Pranzetti and his group’s model has been explained in Physical Review Letters, and while it's going to be quite difficult to prove ultimately that black holes are in fact two-dimensional, theoretical physicists are definitly going to try anyway. This research might just be the next crucial stage to get them further on their way, and that's pretty freaking cool.

Updated version of the previous article.