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On reality: The Universe as a Hologram
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
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