You might think that your modern PC screen has a pretty high resolution, but reality is a quadrillion times better – a hundred trillion dots per inch, can you imagine? A collaboration between Fermilab scientists and a hundreds of meters of laser may have found the very pixels of reality, grains of spacetime one tenth of a femtometer across. Question time is when we will stop distinguish real from virtual world.

The GEO600 system is armed with six hundred meters of laser tube, which sounds like enough to equip an entire Star War, but these lasers are not for not destruction, but for detection. GEO600′s length means it can measure changes of one part in six hundred million, accurate enough to detect even the tiniest ripples in space time – assuming it isn’t thrown off by somebody sneezing within a hundred meters or the wrong types of cloud overhead. The problem with such an incredibly sensitive device is just that, as all products that use laser it’s incredibly sensitive.

The interferometer staff constantly battle against unwanted aberration, and were struggling against a particularly persistent signal when Fermilab Professor Craig Hogan suggested the problem wasn’t with their equipment but with reality itself. ( the reality is broken ?) The quantum limit of reality, the Planck length, occurs at a far smaller length scale than their signal – but according to Hogan, because we’re all holograms this literal ultimate limit of tininess might be scaled up.

The idea is that all of our spatial dimensions can be represented by a ‘surface’ with one less dimension, just like a 3D hologram can be built out of information in 2D foils. The foils in our case are the edges of the observable universe, where quantum fluctuations at the Planck scale are ‘scaled up’ into the ripples observed by the GEO600 team. We’d like to remind you that although we’re talking about “The GEO600 Laser Team probing the edge of reality”, this is not a movie.

What does this mean for you? In everyday action, nothing much – we’re afraid that a fundamentally holographic nature doesn’t allow you to travel around playing guitar and fighting crime Whether reality is as you see it, or you’re the representation of interactions on a surface at the edge of the universe, getting run over by a truck will still kill you.

In intellectual terms, though, this should raise so many fascinating questions you’ll never need TV again. While in the extreme earliest stages, with far more work to go before anyone can draw any conclusions, this is some of the most mind-bending metaphysical science you’ll ever see.

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