The Holographic Universe
Michael Talbot
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 is 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 hologram
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 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 bluü 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.
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so
many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the
human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of
10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime
(or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other
capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for
information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two
lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to
record many different images on the same surface. It has been
demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as
10 billion bits of information.
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we
need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more
understandable if the brain functions according to holographic
principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind
when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort
back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at
an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and
"animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.
Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking
process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross-
correlated with every other piece of information--another feature
intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is
infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps
nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.
The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle
that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model
of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the
avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light
frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world
of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely
what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort
of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently
meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram
believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic
principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives
through he senses into the inner world of our perceptions.
An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses
holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory,
in fact, has gained increasing support among
neurophysiologists.
Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the
holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by
the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving
their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear,
Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this
ability.
Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a
recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an
almost uncanny realism.
Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard"
reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also
received a good deal of experimental support.
It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much
broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.
Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems
are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in
part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that
even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of
frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the
holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are
sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.
But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of
the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's
theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary
reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of
frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects
some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically
transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective
reality?
Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East
have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and
although we may think we are physical beings moving through a
physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of
frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into
physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the
superhologram.
This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and
Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm,
and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it
has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers
believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has
arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some
mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and
even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.
Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that
many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable
in terms of the holographic paradigm.
In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible
portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely
interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the
holographic level.
It is obviously much easier to understand how information can
travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at
a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved
puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic
paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling
phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of
consciousness.