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Comment by chton | Hacker News Reader

The Fermilab press release the article is based on is dated at today (august 26, 2014): http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2014/2-D-Ho...

I've also asked Fermilab directly and they confirm the article is from today, the holometer came online very recently: https://twitter.com/FermilabToday/status/504286464637939712

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The August 2014 issue of Scientific American had an article by Afshordi, Mann, and Pourhasan entitled "The Black Hole That Birthed the Big Bang" on a holographic theory of the universe.

The article [0] is paywalled, but the preview contains a note from a reader suggesting "the holographic principle shares the same problems of all Idealist notions: rather than relying on evidence, it puts the elegance of the model first as an argument in its favor."

I hope the Fermilab experiments provide some useful data.

[0] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-black-hole-tha...

That's definitely a valid criticism, and one that can be levelled to a lot of popular theories like string theory (where holographic theory originates from) and quantum loop gravity. It's a short-term problem though, since we're more and more capable of searching for the needed evidence.

Yeah, formalizing thoughts into models, and then testing them to validate or invalidate them is sooo idealist. I wish scientists would only rely on common sense and holy books, trusting their guts to do the right thing.

The alternative is first collecting empirical results that current theories do not explain, and only then work on a model for explaining them.

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