The idea that gravity somehow wants to push you towards one less dimension. I think it's really something deep that may well be true of quantum gravity, that when we really understand it better in the long run. But having said all that, and the very nice version of the sales pitch for the holographic principle, like you said, that's not the universe that we live in. We have a positive energy density in empty space, a positive cosmological constant. And so the conjecture is that true of our universe.
It’s a big universe we live in, so it comes as no surprise that big numbers are needed to describe it. There are roughly 10^22 stars in the observable universe, and about 10^88 particles altogether. But these numbers are nothing compared to some of the truly ginormous quantities that mathematicians have found to talk about, with inscrutable names like Graham’s Number and TREE(3). Could such immense numbers have any meaningful relationship with the physical world? In his recent book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, theoretical physicist Antonio Padilla explores both our actual universe and the abstract world of immense numbers, and finds surprising connections between them.
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Antonio (Tony) Padilla received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Durham. He is currently a Royal Society Research Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. He is a frequent contributor to the YouTube series Sixty Symbols and Numberphile.
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