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1. glenstein · 1790352638 · focus · HN ↗

   As a non expert who's just curious about science but also tries to talk like a normal person, from what I can tell holography really seems like it's now the leading candidate to be the next big conceptual revolution in physics.

   There's not necessarily any breakthrough right around the corner and we shouldn't rush to coronation preemptively, but there's a lot of physics "voting with their feet" for holography as the article says, and I think it's officially time to start getting hyped. It could have sanity-restoring answers to questions of quantum weirdness, albeit at the rather expensive cost of giving up even more on our day to day intuitions about space and time in favor of an apparently informational substrate.

   String theory had a generation of great science communicators writing its books and singing its praises, but holography doesn't yet have equivalent public champions, and I hope that's something that changes sooner than later.

   1. auntienomen · 1790354994 · focus · HN ↗

      I don't think the distinction between holography and string theory is as clean as you're making it. The vague idea of holography predates string theory, but most of the working examples we have of holography come from string theory. That's what AdS/CFT is: It's an explicitly holographic description of superstring theory in an anti-Desitter space. It's frankly bizarre that the author of this article doesn't mention that fact. I suspect we are seeing a popular science rebranding of string theory without the word strings.

      1. glenstein · 1790356492 · focus · HN ↗

         I didn't intend to assert a clean distinction, you're exactly right about its connection to string theory. What I mean is that String Theory Writ Large enjoyed a lot of popular esteem in the 00s and 2010s in public communication as being our potential new framework for what lies beneath the quantum world, but string theory is huge in and of itself.

         It's more a difference of emphasis (holography in particular) than something that's outside the scope of string theory.

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