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Hi Ray!  I forget the judge's name, but when he was asked to define
pornography, he said, "I know it when I see it."  This is not my area of
expertise, but I know a hologram when I see it.  The particular type of
hologram the author describes below is a projected 3D image of a material
object.  It looks "real."  One can view it from any direction, and there it
is.  Yet, it is only an image.  It's not a tangible thing.  One can't touch it
(in the sense that most of us think of touch), because it is non-material.
Yet, as we look at it, we see something "real."  On Star Tek: The Next
Generation, the Enterprise had a "holodeck," where crew members could dial up
any kind of situation with which to interact, containing like-real humans and
like-real settings, but it was all imagery.  (Of course, in the Star Trek
version, crew members could "touch" these images as if they were material
things.)  I think what Lanza is saying is that much of our individual reality
consists of what we perceive as being "there," but isn't necessarily "really"
there, in the material sense.  Speaking of sense, did I make any?  Scott

PS: To many people on this planet, PD--like every other malady--is only an
illusion.  Maybe so, but as an illusion myself :-), I'd hate to be the one to
tell that to the sufferer.  The "illusionary" response would break my
"illusionary" heart.

>===== Original Message From Parkinson's Information Exchange Network
<[log in to unmask]> =====
>Scott, can you explain in simpler terms than expressed in this article what
>"holographic" or a hologram means?
>Thanks, Ray
>
>
>Biocentric and Holographic Universe
>I recently stumbled across an intriguing interpretation of the implications
>of quantum physics. I thought this fit rather nicely with some other
>theories I've come upon, so I decided to attempt to integrate them.
>
>In the American Scholar article "A New Theory of the Universe", Dr.Robert
>Lanza tells physicists they've been barking up the wrong tree. Lanza is a
>leading expert in tissue engineering, cloning and stem cell research. He is
>not a physicist and so is likely to be ignored by the physics community.
>Yet, he may be on to something.
>"The urgent and primary questions of the universe have been undertaken by
>those physicists who are trying to explain the origins of everything with
>grand unified theories. But as exciting and glamorous as these theories are,
>they are an evasion, if not a reversal, of the central mystery of knowledge:
>that the laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer. And
>more important than this, that the observer in a significant sense creates
>reality and not the other way around. Recognition of this insight leads to a
>single theory that unifies our understanding of the world.
>..As unimaginable as it may seem to us, the logic of quantum physics is
>inescapable. Every morning we open our front door to bring in the paper or
>to go to work. We open the door to rain, snow, or trees swaying in the
>breeze. We think the world churns along whether we happen to open the door
>or not. Quantum mechanics tells us it doesn't.
>
>The trees and snow evaporate when we're sleeping. The kitchen disappears
>when we're in the bathroom. When you turn from one room to the next, when
>your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the
>ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting-the kitchen and all its
>seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness-or into waves of
>probability. The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way
>around as we have been taught. For each life there is a universe, its own
>universe. We generate spheres of reality, individual bubbles of existence."
>I think this fits well with the notion of a holographic universe. Consider a
>transmission hologram. At first it appears to be simply an interference
>pattern, but when illuminated with a laser a fully realized 3D object pops
>into view. In a similar way, the universe exists as an interference pattern
>of probability waves. When a portion of the pattern is "lit up" by an
>observer it generates what we perceive as physical reality. Perhaps each
>bubble generates an "image" of the whole universe, just as individual pieces
>of a hologram that has been cut apart retain the entire image, but with some
>loss of detail.
>
>There is some theoretical support for a holographic universe. Per Wikipedia,
>"The holographic principle is a speculative conjecture about quantum gravity
>theories, proposed by Gerard 't Hooft and improved and promoted by Leonard
>Susskind, claiming that all of the information contained in a volume of
>space can be represented by a theory that lives in the boundary of that
>region."
>
>I'm going to try and paraphrase the Wikipedia description of the reasoning
>so we don't get too bogged down:
>
>The entropy that can be contained in any given volume of space can not be
>any larger than the entropy of the largest black hole that can fit in that
>space. The more massive the black hole, the larger the surface area of the
>event horizon. This means the maximum entropy for any region of space is
>determined by surface area, not by volume. This is counter-intuitive because
>entropy is an extensive variable, being directly proportional to mass, which
>is proportional to volume (all else being equal, including the density of
>the mass). If entropy of ordinary mass is also proportional to area, this
>implies that volume itself is somehow illusory: that mass occupies area, not
>volume, and so the universe is really a hologram which corresponds to the
>information encoded on its boundaries.
>
>Then there are the philosophies of David Bohm, the quantum physicist who
>wrote "Wholeness and the Implicit Order"
>Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind of giant,
>flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in
>some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. The explicate order
>is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent
>stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are
>generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment,
>for subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order
>and then recrystallizing.
>More on David Bohm later.
>
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Scott E. Antes
Department of Anthropology
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5200

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