Just the 15 minutes. He kept evading the questions, and the only "interesting" thing he said was pure science-fiction speculation.
For example, his description of the holographic principle is what you'd get if you asked a high school student to make up a cool sounding story based on the phrase alone. It reminded me of a scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion, where one of the Angels "projects" a 3D shadow.
To put it mildly: "That's not how any of that works, at all."
The holographic principle is an observation from theoretical physics that it's possible to reframe the laws of physics over a volume of space as a different set of mathematics on the surface. This is akin to the Fourier transform, it's just reprojecting the mathematics, not people! It's not a teleporter between parallel universes!
For anyone interested: the concept arose from how black holes grow. If a black hole grows twice as heavy, then instead of its volume becoming twice as big (like you'd expect), its surface area doubles instead. Holographic theory is based on this and says that everything in a volume of space can be simulated with a "hologram" on the surface of that space -- you don't need a x^3 simulation, an x^2 one will do. The idea is that there is a lot of redundancy in mostly empty space. Physics doesn't "allow" arbitrary things to go on in there, so the redundancy can be squeezed out by doing all of the maths on the surface, which is less redundant.
Black holes are maximally packed with physical information, so their surface is completely non-redundant, and hence must grow in proportion to their mass. As you add more stuff, you need more surface, and hence the event horizon expands outwards, providing more surface area.
That's exactly what I thought was interesting/weird! What a bizarre and almost nonsensical thing to get into in a congressional hearing... guy doesn't even have a PhD in physics, nor has he ever worked as a physicist let alone an astrophysicist, isn't a subject matter expert but decides to go into a conversation about holotheory of all things.
For example, his description of the holographic principle is what you'd get if you asked a high school student to make up a cool sounding story based on the phrase alone. It reminded me of a scene from Neon Genesis Evangelion, where one of the Angels "projects" a 3D shadow.
To put it mildly: "That's not how any of that works, at all."
The holographic principle is an observation from theoretical physics that it's possible to reframe the laws of physics over a volume of space as a different set of mathematics on the surface. This is akin to the Fourier transform, it's just reprojecting the mathematics, not people! It's not a teleporter between parallel universes!
For anyone interested: the concept arose from how black holes grow. If a black hole grows twice as heavy, then instead of its volume becoming twice as big (like you'd expect), its surface area doubles instead. Holographic theory is based on this and says that everything in a volume of space can be simulated with a "hologram" on the surface of that space -- you don't need a x^3 simulation, an x^2 one will do. The idea is that there is a lot of redundancy in mostly empty space. Physics doesn't "allow" arbitrary things to go on in there, so the redundancy can be squeezed out by doing all of the maths on the surface, which is less redundant.
Black holes are maximally packed with physical information, so their surface is completely non-redundant, and hence must grow in proportion to their mass. As you add more stuff, you need more surface, and hence the event horizon expands outwards, providing more surface area.