Hogan’s Noise: A Cosmologist Suggests a Novel Way to Uncover the Nature of Spacetime on the Smallest Scales

From Ron Cowen, ScienceNews

Oh, the noise!

Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!

That’s the one thing he hated!

The NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!

— Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

The Grinch detested the noise created by the tiny residents of Whoville. Cosmologist Craig Hogan, in contrast, has become enamored of a noise he claims is generated by something even tinier — a minuscule graininess in the otherwise smooth structure of spacetime.

Call it Hogan’s noise. Many physicists are skeptical, but if his hunch about the existence of this subatomic clatter proves correct, it could have a mind-boggling implication: that the entire universe is nothing more than a giant hologram.

What’s more, it would mean that the structure of spacetime on subatomic scales might soon be revealed. “What’s new is that we can make a prediction and design an experiment to measure something on the tiniest of scales in the universe, and that’s what hasn’t been done before,” says Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Ill., and a researcher at the University of Chicago.

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