[Advaita-l] New experiment to test the nature of universe - The Hindu

[subhanu via Advaita-l]

"Here is a news item the implications of which members with science background may explain in simpler terms:"
Namaste, the origins of this fascinating journey in science can be traced to the famous "Hawking Paradox", a scientific battle that raged for years between the two friends yet scientific adversaries Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind. At a lecture for a closed group of experts many years ago,  Hawking was discussing what happened when objects fell into black holes. He made the throwaway comment that as an object crosses the event horizon (the boundary in a black hole beyond which the laws of physics cease to have meaning , mathematically defined by the Schwarzschild radius-Schwarzschild was the first to solve Einstein's field equations of general relativity with an exact solution under specific conditions), all its information is lost to the universe forever. This troubled Susskind and his Nobel laureate colleague Gerard t'Hooft, as it meant the laws of cause and effect etc would break down. They felt it broke an inviolable law of nature (a "zeroth" law) that information can be hopelessly scrambled but never lost. They couldn't convince a stubborn Hawking until with the math of Juan Maldacena they came up with an ingenious solution: that the information is smeared across the event horizon and not lost. The logical leap was to then realise that the boundary of the universe is very much like its own event horizon and that all the information of the universe is somehow projected /superimposed on a substrate of this larger event horizon (in a formulation of space known as de Sitter space)  in the way a 3D image is superimposed on a 2D hologram. It turned out that the math worked beautifully and scientists have been looking for experiments to verify this. This is the basis of the article quoted in Sri Subramanian's post. Keen followers of Advaita will see clearly the role of adhyāsa in explaining the phenomenological universe. Science and the holographic principle is showing how the world is a superimposition on a substrate from the standpoint of an observer, even time itself. Advaita will add the word "ignorant" before observer, in conformance with the vārtikā ajñāta ātmā jagatah kārańam , the world is falsely imagined by one who has not known Brahman.
Leonard Susskind is not only one of the leading lights in string theory, but is also a brilliant communicator and teacher. His lectures on string theory at Stanford are available on the net for all. Below is a lecture where he explains in his words the holographic principle. Not he says the populist view in the press that the world is a hologram is not quite what the science says.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY
Below is a full BBC horizon program that explains the Hawking Paradox debate well.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uRUIoZJY2lM

Regards
Subhanu