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***Warning Physics Article***
Universe a Phantasm?
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
smellisin 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 unsolvedpuzzles in psychology.
In particular, Stanislav 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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