“According to modern quantum theory, energy fields permeate the universe, and flurries of energy in these fields, called “particles” when they are pointlike and “waves” when they are diffuse, serve as the building blocks of matter and forces. But new findings suggest this wave-particle picture offers only a superficial view of nature’s constituents.”
“If each energy field pervading space is thought of as the surface of a pond, and waves and particles are the turbulence on that surface, then the new evidence strengthens the argument that a vibrant, hidden world lies beneath.”
“If waves and particles are like the turbulence on the surface of a pond, the connection between that turbulence and events in the interior of the pond was first described by a mathematical principle discovered in 1997.”
“In a landmark paper, Juan Maldacena, an Argentinian-American physicist then at Harvard University and now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., showed that events taking place in a 3-D region of space mathematically correspond to very different events taking place on that region’s 2-D boundary. (Events in 4-D also correspond to events in 3-D, and 5-D to 4-D and so on.)”
“Consider the 3-D interior and 2-D surface of the metaphoric pond. For the correspondence to work, the interior must be mathematically described by string theory, in which electrons, photons, gravitons and the rest of nature’s building blocks are invisibly small, one-dimensional lines, or “strings.” Mass and other macroscopic properties correspond to the strings’ vibrations, and interactions between different kinds of matter and forces come from the way strings split and connect. These strings live inside the pond.”
“Now, imagine that the 2-D surface of the pond is described by quantum mechanics. Particles are the splashes on the surface, and waves are the cascade of ripples from those splashes. On the surface of this imaginary pond, there is no force of gravity.”
“Maldacena’s discovery, known as the holographic duality, showed that events in the interior region, which involve gravity and are described by string theory, are mathematically translatable to events on the surface, which are gravity-free and described by quantum particle theories.”
“If the holographic duality yields increasingly accurate predictions about the behavior of cuprates and other strongly correlated materials, these materials can be conceived as, essentially, being black holes in higher dimensions.”
““The wave-particle duality was, when first proposed, a big surprise because these were two seemingly different concepts, and we learned that they are the same thing,” Horowitz said. The holographic duality “is more sophisticated, but it has that same feature,” he said. “You have two very different-seeming objects that turn out to be completely equivalent.””
““Physics was traditionally reductionist; it wants to take something complicated and find out what the building blocks are,” Hartnoll explained. “The point is there’s not a unique way to do that: In some cases, electrons could be the building blocks, but in others, collective excitations of electrons are playing a more fundamental role than any of the individual electrons.”