08.03.10
While Bousso was working on his observer's-eye view of the multiverse, cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston was formulating another approach to the global picture. Vilenkin, too, had become dissatisfied with past approaches to measure making, and had decided there had to be a better way. Together with Jaume Garriga of the University of Barcelona in Spain, Vilenkin thought there might be some clues in an earlier breakthrough made by Argentinean physicist Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Maldacena had been working with string theory to build model universes when he made a startling discovery. He found a model in a bizarrely shaped universe with five dimensions that is exactly equivalent to a simpler model on its four-dimensional boundary. This is a classic example of what is known as the "holographic principle", the idea that for a space in any number of dimensions, all the physics inside that space can be encoded on its outer boundary in much the same way that a two-dimensional hologram on a credit card can encode all the information about a 3D object.
Vilenkin and Garriga figured the entire multiverse must similarly have a holographic image living on its boundary (arxiv.org/abs/0905.1509). In the case of the multiverse, though, the boundary is not a frontier in space, but in time, infinitely far into the future. Could it hold a uniquely defined measure for the multiverse?
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