Two-dimensional space

Uh, keeps it interesting.

We're gonna discuss the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys today, the largest 2D map the universe ever created.

First, why were these under-- surveys undertaken, and what were their goals?

Yeah.

And it's very hard because your eyes are really good in many ways.

And of course, the way your eyes can process different depths, it's very hard for any static image, 2D image to represent that back to you.

That's why things don't, that's why photos look different than real life, duh, right? All I have to say is that because I know the cameras are getting better, it is plausible, maybe not now, but near future, two years, five years, 10 years, where you could get a camera that zooms in on the moon without AI enhancement that is as good as my DSLR from like 12 years ago.

And then you're taking, oh, that's a quote unquote real photo of the moon.

Right.

And what Maldacena's math proved is that these two radically different systems, the 3D gravity-filled bulk on the inside and the 2D gravity-less boundary on the outside, are mathematically equivalent.

So everything happening inside that warped 3D universe, even the gravitational pull between objects, is perfectly encoded in the complex quantum entanglement happening between the particles sitting flat on the 2D boundary.

Yes.

The analogy I always go back to, because this stuff is so hard to picture, is to think of the universe as a solid soup can.

Basically all the messy physics we associate with moving through space.

Right.

But the flat 2D paper label wrapped around the outside of the can has no gravity at all, yet everything happening to the soup inside is perfectly encoded in the ink on that flat label.

Basically, Flatland has three shapes.

You've got triangles, circles, and squares, and it's all 2D.

So all you can really see is how a triangle starts at the point and it goes wide.

right and the circle kind of evenly goes around the squares flat and then you could see the edges kind of thing but that's all you could see one day a sphere enters the 2d realm and like fucks up this triangle who's like what am i even looking at because like a sphere passing through the 2d would look like a circle that got was small got wider and then got small again and He takes the triangle from the 2D realm and shows him the 3D realm.

It's really crazy.

The whole thing was meant to be like a political satire to the Victorian era England.

So if there's a third dimension, take me to see the fourth dimension.

And the sphere is like, there's no fourth dimension, you idiot.

That's so clever.

They modeled a 2D plane of solid material as an equivalent framework of elastic rods.

It was a structural analog using a known structural framework to approximate an unknown continuum.

It's an incredible hack.

The geometry and the physics of the problem dictate what kind of math you should use.

The text breaks this library down into distinct dimensional categories.

Like 1D, 2D, 3D.

First, you have 1D line elements.

There's bummer to it, but I don't wanna focus on the bummer side of it, if that makes sense.

My story of the week is that 2XKO, which is Riot's, um, fighting game, tag fighting game, the, the, the 2D, you know, character fighting game that they had been working on for a while and was teased and, and slow re- It had a...

Oh, what was it called? Project Alpha? Project...

All right.

If you've been solving the same problem for years and you haven't gotten anywhere, and you've thought that pushing harder was the way to tackle that, maybe the map you're using is the one that is holding you back, and harder is one of only two directions available.

So my guest today says that the map that we're using is missing a dimension, and that we think in 2D when there's a whole new dimension to think about, and that most of us flatten our lives to fit in with... to fit in that 2D dimension.

And he's already proven this with me because I have worked with this guest before, and still do, and I know that you are gonna absolutely love having him here today.

So welcome back to the Second Voice podcast, where we uncover the conversations that leaders don't have out loud.

Yeah.

Let's get into it.

So usually I start with like, you know, tell us more about you, but I actually wanna start with the whole 2D, 3D thing because-

Sure