170 lines
9.0 KiB
Plaintext
170 lines
9.0 KiB
Plaintext
THE UNIVERSE AS HOLOGRAM
|
|
|
|
DOES OBJECTIVE REALITY EXIST, OR IS THE UNIVERSE A
|
|
PHANTASM?
|
|
|
|
In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University
|
|
of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect
|
|
performed what may turn out to be one of the most important
|
|
experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on
|
|
the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of
|
|
reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard
|
|
Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery
|
|
may change the face of science.
|
|
|
|
Aspect and his team discovered that under certain
|
|
circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are
|
|
able to instantaneously communicate with each other
|
|
regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't
|
|
matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.
|
|
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is
|
|
doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates
|
|
Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel
|
|
faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than
|
|
the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time
|
|
barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to
|
|
try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's
|
|
findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more
|
|
radical explanations. University of London physicist David
|
|
Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that
|
|
objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent
|
|
solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and
|
|
splendidly detailed hologram.
|
|
|
|
To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion,
|
|
one must first understand a little about holograms. A
|
|
hologram is a three-
|
|
dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a
|
|
hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in
|
|
the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam id
|
|
bounced off the reflected light of the first and the
|
|
resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser
|
|
beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is
|
|
developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark
|
|
lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by
|
|
another laser beam, a three-
|
|
dimensional image of the original object appears.
|
|
|
|
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only
|
|
remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a
|
|
rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half
|
|
will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.
|
|
Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of
|
|
film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact
|
|
version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs,
|
|
every part of a halogram contains all the information possessed
|
|
by the whole.
|
|
|
|
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us
|
|
with an entirely new way of understanding organization and
|
|
order. For most of its history, Western science has labored
|
|
under the bias that the best way to understand a physical
|
|
phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and
|
|
study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some
|
|
things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach.
|
|
If we try to take apart something constructed holographically,
|
|
we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only
|
|
get smaller wholes.
|
|
|
|
This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding
|
|
Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic
|
|
particles are able to remain in contact with one another
|
|
regardless of the distance separating them is not because they
|
|
are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but
|
|
because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at
|
|
some deeper level of reality such particles are not
|
|
individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same
|
|
fundamental something.
|
|
|
|
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm
|
|
offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium
|
|
containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the
|
|
aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it
|
|
contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at
|
|
the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As
|
|
you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that
|
|
the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After
|
|
all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each
|
|
of the images will be slightly different. But as you
|
|
continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually
|
|
become aware that there is a certain relationship between
|
|
them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly
|
|
different but corresponding turn; when on faces the front,
|
|
the other always faces toward the side. If you remain
|
|
unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even
|
|
conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating
|
|
with one another, but this is clearly not the case. This,
|
|
says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic
|
|
particles in Aspect's experiment.
|
|
|
|
According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light
|
|
connection between subatomic particles is really telling us
|
|
that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a
|
|
more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the
|
|
aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic
|
|
particles as separate from one another because we are seeing
|
|
only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not
|
|
separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more
|
|
underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and
|
|
indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since
|
|
everything in physical reality is comprised of these
|
|
eidolons, the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.
|
|
|
|
In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe
|
|
would possess other rather startling features. If the
|
|
apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory,
|
|
it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in
|
|
the universe are infinitely interconnected. The electrons
|
|
in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the
|
|
subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims,
|
|
every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in
|
|
the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and
|
|
although human nature may seek to categorize and
|
|
pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the
|
|
universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and
|
|
all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.
|
|
|
|
In a holographic universe, even time and space could no
|
|
longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as
|
|
location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly
|
|
separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional
|
|
space, like the images of the fish on the tv monitors,
|
|
would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper
|
|
order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram
|
|
in which the past, present, and future all exist
|
|
simultaneously. This suggest that given the proper tools it
|
|
might even be possible to someday reach into the
|
|
superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the
|
|
long-forgotten past.
|
|
|
|
What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended
|
|
question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the
|
|
superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything
|
|
in our universe, at the very least it contains every
|
|
subatomic particle that has been or will be--every
|
|
configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from
|
|
snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It
|
|
must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of All That Is.
|
|
Although Bohm conce
|
|
|
|
X-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-X
|
|
|
|
Another file downloaded from: NIRVANAnet(tm)
|
|
|
|
& the Temple of the Screaming Electron Jeff Hunter 510-935-5845
|
|
Rat Head Ratsnatcher 510-524-3649
|
|
Burn This Flag Zardoz 408-363-9766
|
|
realitycheck Poindexter Fortran 415-567-7043
|
|
Lies Unlimited Mick Freen 415-583-4102
|
|
|
|
Specializing in conversations, obscure information, high explosives,
|
|
arcane knowledge, political extremism, diversive sexuality,
|
|
insane speculation, and wild rumours. ALL-TEXT BBS SYSTEMS.
|
|
|
|
Full access for first-time callers. We don't want to know who you are,
|
|
where you live, or what your phone number is. We are not Big Brother.
|
|
|
|
"Raw Data for Raw Nerves"
|
|
|
|
X-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-X
|