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Comment by qnleigh

1 day ago

Susskind's original paper is shockingly readable, at least the first section. It doesn't use a lot of fancy math or derivations to justify holography. Mostly it uses basic concepts from undergraduate physics to show how the idea of holography is consistent and makes sense, despite it seeming incredibly counterintuitive at first glance.

For instance, figure 3 shows how you can't hide a black hole behind another black hole, which has implications for how a 3D universe can be completely encoded in a 2D region.

https://arxiv.org/html/hep-th/9409089v2

I recommend when sharing arxiv links to link to the abstract. That way your reader can decide for themselves whether they want to bother with either a PDF or HTML version, especially since the HTML views are still experimental and have occasional display issues across devices.

Link to the abstract of that paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409089v2

Thanks for sharing!

  • Fortunately, it's very simple to navigate between pdf, html, and abstract, just put "abs" in the URL where it says pdf and so on.

Much of Susskind's papers are like that. A few simple equations motivated by dimensional analysis, a couple of Penrose diagrams, and the rest speculation and insight.

What shape is space? Like, how far does space extend "above" and "below" where the Earth hangs in space? What stuff is there in both areas?

My concept of space is informed by the hammock analogy where gravity is the result of the bodies' mass/density causing the fabric to sag and draw in approaching objectz