..............................................................
>From the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]:
From: "Lloyd Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: IS UNIVERSE a HOLOGRAM ???
Date: Sunday, July 30, 2000 4:25 AM
---- Forwarded message -----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000
Subj: IS UNIVERSE a HOLOGRAM ???
COMMUNIQUE #2311
-----------------
"Only puny secrets need protection.
Big discoveries are protected by
public incredulity."
-- Marshall McLuhan writes in his
1972 book "Take Today"
From: Ambrose Hawk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Universe as a 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 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
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.
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 some 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 every 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 the 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.
In the 1950s, while conducting research into the
beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had
one female patient who suddenly became convinced she
had assumed the identity of a female of a species of
prehistoric reptile. During the course of her
hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed
description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in
such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of
the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on
the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was
that although the woman had no prior knowledge about
such things, a conversation with a zoologist later
confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored
areas on the head do indeed play an important role as
triggers of sexual arousal.
The woman's experience was not unique. During the
course of his research, Grof encountered examples of
patients regressing and identifying with virtually
every species on the evolutionary tree (research
findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene
in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that
such experiences frequently contained obscure
zoological details which turned out to be accurate.
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only
puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He
also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort
of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with
little or no education suddenly gave detailed
descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and
scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of
experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of
out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the
future, of regressions into apparent past-life
incarnations.
In later research, Grof found the same range of
phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not
involve the use of drugs. Because the common element
in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of
an individual's consciousness beyond the usual
boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and
time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal
experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a
branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology"
devoted entirely to their study.
Although Grof's newly founded Association of
Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing
group of like-minded professionals and has become a
respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof
or any of his colleagues were able to offer a
mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological
phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed
with the advent of the holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part
of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only
to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to
every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of
space and time itself,the fact that it is able to
occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have
transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.
The holographic paradigm also has implications for
so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a
psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has
pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but
a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to
say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is
consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain
as well as the body and everything else around us we
interpret as physical.
Such a turnabout in the way we view biological
structures has caused researchers to point out that
medicine and our understanding of the healing process
could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm.
If the apparent physical structure of the body is but
a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes
clear that each of us is much more responsible for our
health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now
view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually
be due to changes in consciousness which in turn
effect changes in the hologram of the body.
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such
as visualization may work so well because in the
holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as
real as "reality". Even visions and experiences
involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable
under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of
Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his
encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by
performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire
grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson
relates that as he and another astonished onlooker
continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to
reappear, then "click" off again and on again several
times in succession.
Although current scientific understanding is incapable
of explaining such events, experiences like this
become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a
holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is
"there" or "not there" because what we call consensus
reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the
human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely
interconnected. If this is true, it is the most
profound implication of the holographic paradigm of
all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's
are not commonplace only because we have not
programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make
them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits
to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of
reality.
What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting
for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything
is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the
mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by
Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo
don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less
miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we
want when we are in our dreams. Indeed, even our most
fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for
in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out,
even random events would have to be seen as based on
holographic principles and therefore determined.
Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly
makes sense, and everything in reality would have to
be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard
events would express some underlying symmetry.
Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm
becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death
remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has
already had an influence on the thinking of many
scientists. And even if it is found that the
holographic model does not provide the best
explanation for the instantaneous communications that
seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic
particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley,
a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's
findings "indicate that we must be prepared to
consider radically new views of reality".
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