Kind of like the hologram you see on a credit card, if that hologram had entire civilizations, all of human history and the entire universe living inside it.
Getty
"Mind you, don't smash the Romans when you swipe it."
And believe it or not, people are putting money into proving this bong hit of a theory. A million dollars, to be exact. Craig Hogan, a physicist from Illinois, is building two holometers. Their job is to monitor the smallest spaces in our universe and look for pixelation in the fabric of space and time. In the same way that people can identify digital quality by spotting the pixels, Hogan thinks he can spot the blurriness in reality by finding Planck units, theoretical units of space, time and mass so teensy that they're pretty much impossible to detect. Here's what Hogan says:
"What we're looking for is when the lasers lose step with each other. We're trying to detect the smallest unit in the universe. This is really great fun, a sort of old-fashioned physics experiment where you don't know what the result will be."
Fermilab
Holometer work requires a good deal of cramped plastic cubes and surgical scrubs.
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