The Universe
as a hologram
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 one 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 suggests 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 concedes
that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does
venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts
it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which
lies "an infinity of further development". Bohm is not the only researcher who
has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of
brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the
holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of
how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown
that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout
the brain. In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley
found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate
its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only
problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this
curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.
Then in the 1960s
Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation
brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in
neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross
the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the
entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram
believes the brain is itself a hologram.-->
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