Western science approaching Vedic paradigm

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The Holographic Universe

Does Objective Reality Exist?

 

By Michael Talbot

3-12-6

 

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 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 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 "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.

 

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.

 

http://www.rense.com/general69/holoff.htm