- 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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