A unique experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory called the Holometer（测高仪） has started collecting data that will answer some mind-bending（离奇古怪令人费解的） questions about our universe -- including whether we live in a hologram. Much like characters on a television show would not know that their seemingly 3-D world exists only on a 2-D screen, we could be clueless that our 3-D space is just an illusion. The information about everything in our universe could actually be encoded in tiny packets in two dimensions.

Do you feel sadder watching a documentary about war or a drama about a young person dying of cancer? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers mistakenly believe they will have stronger emotional reactions when stories are based on true events rather than fiction. "Consumers may choose to read a tragic¹ fictional² story because they assume that knowing it was fictional would make them less sad than reading a less dramatic, but true story," write authors Jane E. J. Ebert (Brandeis University) and Tom Meyvis (New York University). "However, the fictional nature does not alter the impact of the tragic story, leaving them more emotionally distraught than if they had read the true story instead."

 

In the midst of emotional experiences, consumers are so absorbed by the actual experience that they might be unable to take into account the fictional nature of the story. The authors tested this in one study by informing viewers that a film they were about to see was fictional. These viewers did feel less sad after watching this fictional movie, but only when breaks were provided, allowing the viewers to mull over the fact that the story was not true.

 

In another study, participants read a tragic story and were asked how they would have felt if they had known that the event in the story really happened or was completely fictional. Not surprisingly, participants indicated they would have felt substantially sadder had they known the story was real. Another group of participants was asked to read the same story and told that the event was either real or fictional. These participants felt sad after reading the story regardless of whether the event actually happened.

 

Publishers and movie studios should note that underestimating the emotional impact of fictional stories may lead consumers to choose less enjoyable books and movies just because they are based on a true story. "Emphasizing realism may indeed make consumers more likely to choose these options, as consumers tend to believe that true stories will have a greater emotional impact than fictional stories. However, our results suggest that while emphasizing realism may increase sales, it does not necessarily increase satisfaction," the authors conclude.

Get close enough to your TV screen and you'll see pixels, small points of data that make a seamless image if you stand back. Scientists think that the universe's information may be contained in the same way and that the natural "pixel size" of space is roughly 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom, a distance that physicists³ refer to as the Planck scale.

 

"We want to find out whether space-time is a quantum system just like matter is," said Craig Hogan, director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics and the developer of the holographic（全息的） noise theory. "If we see something, it will completely change ideas about space we've used for thousands of years."

 

Quantum theory suggests that it is impossible to know both the exact location and the exact speed of subatomic particles. If space comes in 2-D bits with limited information about the precise location of objects, then space itself would fall under the same theory of uncertainty⁴. The same way that matter continues to jiggle (as quantum waves) even when cooled to absolute zero, this digitized space should have built-in vibrations⁵ even in its lowest energy state.

 

Essentially⁶, the experiment probes the limits of the universe's ability to store information. If there is a set number of bits that tell you where something is, it eventually becomes impossible to find more specific information about the location -- even in principle. The instrument testing these limits is Fermilab's Holometer, or holographic interferometer（全息干涉仪）, the most sensitive device ever created to measure the quantum jitter⁷ of space itself.

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