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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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