- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- To enable people to better visualize
what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- This, says Bohm, is precisely what is
going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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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- 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).
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Zucarelli has also developed the technology
of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations
with an almost uncanny realism.
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- 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.
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- It has been found that each of our senses
is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously
suspected.
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- 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 "cosmic 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.
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Numerous researchers, including Bohm
and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much
more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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