I've made no secret of my belief that when all is said and done we will find our universe to be a hologram generated by a recursive fractal formula. Cosmology is founded on the assumption that when you look at the universe at the vastest scales, matter is spread more or less evenly throughout space. Cosmologists call this a "smooth" structure. But a small band of researchers, led by statistical physicist Luciano Pietronero of the University of Rome and the Institute of Complex Systems, Italy, argues that this assumption is at odds with what we can see. The following page likns to a number of Dr. Pietronero's papers. Click Here .

Darn, so I've been living inside an hologram all these years?

Inside one? Of course not ... you/we are one.

Must be a pretty darn good hologram generator...

I personally prefer to think of the universe as being total chaos, and it's only humans and their need for order and reason trying to make sense of it all by using mathematical constructs to make sens of it all.

"Disorder is only an order to complex for other people to understand"

You look at a hologram and see order?

You look at a fractal and see order?

Where?

Hello chaps! Another weird and fascinating topic. Where do you find them, DA?

I don't know anything about this cosmic hologram thing, so before I can make a worthy comment I'll have to do some reading. In the meantime:

In fractals, isn't it the case that similar, but never identical patterns are repeated at different scales to infinity? In that sense can there not be said to be a pattern, i.e, an order? Also, is it not true that chaos theory is opening the door to enabling predictions of behaviour in non-linear (chaotic) systems?

Red ... check out the links at the top of this thread or google for "fractal" and "universe."

Also look up "Julia sets" and "Mandelbrot Sets" and "Quaternion Algebra." Here's one place to have some fun:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/2854/

One definition of a fractal is infinite complexity in finite space.