Modern physics is forcing us to rethink existence | Michelle Thaller: Full Interview

Michelle Thaller studied binary stars — two stars orbiting each other with colliding winds of high-energy particles producing giant shocks in space. Most stars in the universe are binary, and for a time, Thaller spent more hours observing certain stars than anyone else on Earth, traveling to observatories in Australia and Arizona, using data from X-ray satellites and the Hubble Space Telescope. But the romantic image of a lone scientist communing with the night sky is only part of the story.

The reality of astronomy is administrative: writing proposals to compete for telescope time, organizing grants to fund research, attending endless meetings. About 80% of an astronomer's time is spent as a business person managing budgets and schedules. The doctorate requires original research, but that doesn't mean inventing ideas from scratch — you apprentice with a professor, slowly take ownership of a piece of their work, and eventually ask your own questions. The system is collaborative, incremental, and bureaucratic.

Yet there are moments when you're alone on a mountaintop, seeing something no human has ever seen before. Thaller's stars were massive — 15 to 50 times the sun's mass — orbiting every few days, their stellar winds colliding to produce shock waves that create water molecules at a rate that could fill Earth's oceans 60 times over in a single day. These shocks, not the core of life as we know it, are where many molecules responsible for life originate. That's the quiet work: figuring out, little by little, how the universe actually works.

Quantum entanglement is not science fiction; it's observable, replicable, and disturbing. Two electrons in the same atomic orbit must have opposing spins — one up, one down. If you separate them by miles or light-years and flip the spin of one, the other flips instantly. Not at the speed of light: instantly. No signal travels because there is no separation at the quantum level. They are the same system.

Could everything in the universe be entangled? There was a time, just after the Big Bang, when the entire observable universe was smaller than an atom — one quantum system. As it expanded, objects became less entangled with things they could no longer interact with. What we perceive as space and time may simply be degrees of entanglement. You are more entangled with the air in your room than with a distant galaxy because you interact with it constantly.

This is the frontier: if you manipulate entanglement directly, you might not need to travel through space at all. An advanced civilization might access the underlying quantum reality and move anywhere in the universe without crossing distance. Space, time, and gravity may all emerge from entanglement — the equations of gravity now arise naturally from quantum mechanics when you start with this assumption. It's not proven, but it's working mathematically, and it suggests that the separation we feel is an illusion.

The term «holographic universe» misleads people into thinking we're living in a simulation. That's not the claim. The holographic principle emerged from attempts to understand black holes: physicists found that treating a black hole's three-dimensional volume as a two-dimensional surface solved paradoxes about information loss. If a particle falls into a black hole, its charge and spin seemed to vanish — but the math worked if you assumed all the information was encoded on the black hole's two-dimensional event horizon.

Scientists then asked: does this apply to the entire universe? Perhaps the laws of physics work better if our reality is fundamentally two-dimensional, with the illusion of three dimensions plus time emerging from that surface, the way a hologram encodes motion and depth on flat film. This doesn't mean someone projected us; it means the universe may store energy and information the way a hologram does. If true, all points in time exist at once — past, present, and future are simultaneous, and our perception of time flowing is like walking past a hologram and seeing the image move. The image doesn't actually move; you do.

This is not fringe speculation. It's serious physics, increasingly popular because it makes general relativity and quantum mechanics compatible. The extension of space and the flow of time may not be real intrinsic properties of the universe — they may be emergent, a consequence of how information is structured, perceived by brains that evolved to navigate a world where those distinctions were useful for survival, not truth.