Even though I don't remember the exact date, very close to twenty years ago would be my best guess, I can remember the people I was with and the gist of the conversation. The conversation involved one of the craziest things I had ever heard in my life (and still is to this day) and I found it mind boggling. I was at a party with two of my very good friends when one of them began talking about "entanglement". I'm not even sure if that's what he called it at the time but he explained it and I was fascinated.
Volumes have been written on this subject and I encourage you to look into if this is something new to you. However, I'm only going to briefly touch on what it is so you can relate to my story going forward. Here is a pretty solid description of entanglement:
Quantum entanglement occurs when particles such as photons, electrons, molecules as large as "buckyballs", and even small diamonds interact physically and then become separated; the type of interaction is such that each resulting member of a pair is properly described by the same quantum mechanical description (state), which is indefinite in terms of important factors such as position,momentum, spin, polarization, etc. ~ Wikipedia (so you know it's true)
I only picked that particular description of entanglement because it mentioned buckyballs. To put it in the most basic of terms ... What happens to one particle directly affects another particle somewhere else in the universe. If science isn't your thing and my "entanglement for dummies" definition still seems Chinese to you, the major mind blowing idea that comes from this occurrence is the fact that this information can travel from one particle to another instantaneously. This means something could happen to one particle and its entangled partner particle could be 10 billion miles away and it would still affect it instantly. This defies everything we understand about the universal speed limit of 186,000 miles a second, the speed of light. If, in fact, information is actually travelling between particles on opposite ends of the universe it would have to move thousands of times the speed of light.
I've always considered myself fairly deep but after listening to this conversation (I'm sure I didn't contribute in any way other than to confirm that what I was hearing was as crazy to my friends as it was to me) I discovered I wasn't nearly as deep as I once thought. It had never occurred to me that things might not be what they seem. It changed forever how I processed everything.
ACT II
Holograms are two dimensional surfaces that show three dimensional objects. When I think of a hologram I always think of R2D2 projecting Princess Leia to Luke and C3PO. Over thirty years later we really haven't noticed too much improvement in the quality of holograms we encounter. They can be found everywhere: driver's license, credit card, CD's. But most of them are pretty cheesy and hardly demonstrate the full potential of a hologram. With the right equipment (lasers, mirrors, beam splitters and so on) we have the ability to make precise holograms that look incredibly real. What's really cool is no special eye wear is needed.
We can do some pretty cool things with holograms: make them change color, make them appear to be looking at you when you walk across the room, and even make them appear to look like completely different objects when viewed from different angles. But the coolest thing about a hologram, in my humble opinion, is the fact that you can cut one in half, and each half contains whole views of the entire holographic image. You could go on and cut another piece and it, too, would contain a whole view of the entire image. If you were able to dissect it into a million pieces, each of those pieces would contain a whole view of the image. It's incredible.
ACT III
Black holes are what remain when massive stars die. They are spooky things and once something passes the event horizon of the black hole it is gone from the universe forever. At least that's what we thought until relatively recently. Stephen Hawking was troubled for over thirty years with this paradox of black holes destroying information. Everything that is currently in the universe has been here all along and will always be here as long as the universe exists. Bermuda triangle type things that gobbled up information didn't seem to jive with what we thought we knew about the nature of everything. Everything indicates that physics works in both directions, forward and backward, but this doesn't ring true if things get eaten up and destroyed going in one direction. Thankfully, fairly recently our understanding of how black holes work has shifted. They're not the giant PacMan's of the universe after all.
Instead of information (and when I say information I mean anything, everything is information) disappearing, forever lost, in black holes, the information is believed to be stored on the surface area of the black hole, later to be emitted back into the universe. Eventually the black hole will die and send the stored information, albeit jumbled and unrecognizable as the same form as when it made contact with the hole, back to the universe. The physicists that support the idea of black holes storing information have demonstrated how it works by explaining how a hologram works in two and three dimensions.
ACT IV
I mentioned earlier the strangest thing I think I've ever heard occurred when I learned of quantum entanglement. A very close rival when it comes to extremely mind boggling ideas to enter my brain is the "double slit experiment". Cutting right to the chase, this experiment showed us that things don't always do what we think they should do when we aren't observing them. There are some really good videos that break it down for school aged children but it is still a hard concept to grasp.
A single photon was fired through either slit A or slit B and the results were tracked when the photon reached its destination. Naturally, when the scientists fired the photon through slit A they expected to see it hit the wall in a location that would indicate it traveled through slit A. However, what they discovered is when the photon is traveling, and not being observed, it does all possible outcomes: it goes through slit A and not through slit B, goes through slit B and not slit A, both slits at the same time, and neither slit. Then when they actually watched the particle to see which slit it went through, it went through the one it was supposed to every time. If it's hard for you to comprehend don't be ashamed, it baffles physicists too. They fired a single particle and it acted like a wave.
FINAL ACT
David Bohm was an American physicist that was born in 1917 and argued with Einstein about the nature of reality. One of Bohm’s most startling assertions is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image. Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world in much the same way that a piece of holographic film gives birth to a hologram. He calls this deeper level of reality the implicate (which means enfolded or hidden) order, and he refers to our own level or existence as the explicate, or unfolded order. Put another way, electrons and all other particles are no more substantive or permanent then the form a geyser of water takes as it gushes out of a fountain. They are sustained by a constant influx from the implicate order, and when a particle appears to be destroyed, it is not lost.
Bohm believed his understanding of reality explained a lot more about what we experience. We know today that the universe is made up of almost all empty space. We (meaning humans, not really America because we don't feel the need to invest in science) are currently conducting amazing experiments at CERN trying to locate a particle that gives mass to all particles. It doesn't make sense to us how so much of the universe is nothing but there seems to be so much mass to the few things that are here.
Hardly a perfect analogy but it will suffice ... Imagine you had a handful of pennies and you laid your bicycle on its side and dropped the pennies through the motionless spokes. Undoubtedly, all of the pennies would pass through the spokes and hit the ground. Sure, they would hit some of the spokes along the way but it would seem unlikely any of the pennies would be halted from their fall by miraculously landing in just the perfect way as to balance it on one spoke. So if you had ten pennies and stood over your sideways bike tire and dropped them, all ten pennies would hit the ground. However, if you were able to spin the tire at a high rate of speed, let's say the speed of light, and you did this same experiment, I would be willing to bet not one penny would make it through the spokes. It would seem as if the inner surface of the wheels where the spokes occupy was a solid surface. Yet, most of the area is actually nothing.
If our reality is more like a hologram than we think (and who has ever really thought our reality was some type of hologram?) it could change some of the ways we look at things. Our senses, the only way we experience reality, provide us with the tools of survival. They weren't evolved to detect the nature of our reality. Things work very well at the macro level, it is only when we try to get down to the micro level that things fall apart. Particles pop in and out of existence and they don't behave they way we would expect them to.
Karl H. Pribram is a professor at Georgetown University, in the United States, and an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and Radford University and board-certified as a neurosurgeon. Pribram's neurobehavioral experiments established the composition of the limbic system and the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex. Pribram also discovered the sensory specific systems of the association cortex, and showed that these systems operate to organize the choices we make among sensory stimuli, not the sensing of the stimuli themselves.
Pribram was extremely interested with how we stored and recollected memories. Pribram had discovered memories weren't logged as single events in individual places in our brains. Instead, they are networked out to all locations and when we think a thought we receive all sorts of information that help us piece it all together. Imagine I say George W. Bush. You might receive thoughts and ideas about Texas, Governor, man, cowboy hat, baseball, fool me once shame on me fool me twice shame on ... well you know how it goes, President, Katrina, war, debt, Laura, daughters, swagger, and thousands more all at the same time coming from all recesses of your brain. This was a very new observation and idea. Pribam later collaborated with Bohm (Pribam contacted Bohm to inquire about the physics perspective on the holographic idea) on a human cognition model and called it the "Holonomic Brain Theory".
From Wikipedia:
The holonomic brain theory is a model for human cognition that is drastically different from conventionally accepted ideas: Pribram and Bohm posit a model of cognitive function as being guided by a matrix of neurological wave interference patterns situated temporally between holographic Gestalt perception and discrete, affective, quantum vectors derived from reward anticipation potentials.
There are those wave functions again. If we are in some sort of hologram there are a million places to take the conversation. And trust me when I tell you the conversation has gone a million places already. My main motivation for writing this piece was mostly based on the daunting task of trying to find relevant information about this subject. There are many super bright people that discuss these things on forums and on their own blogs, but far too often it takes a turn into "The Secret" type stuff and "Law of Attraction" and I just don't see the connection.
FINAL FINAL ACT
Even though I think too many people take these progressive ideas too far, I do concede I think there is a lot of truth in many organizations of all rank and file. There have been people for thousands of years that have been telling us our reality isn't real. And I'm not talking about nut jobs, I mean real religions and great thinkers. And many a past and current religion seems to have a lot of these ideas when they teach unity and love. And Christianity's seven day creation story seems a lot more plausible if God was simply creating a hologram. "Let there be light" takes on a whole new meaning. It just seems more than likely that after hundreds, and even thousands, of years of passing down stories these things got altered and tailored to suit the needs of those in power.
If we live in a hologram or not doesn't really answer some of the deeper questions in life. It certainly doesn't answer any of the "why's". It really just begins to answer some "what's" and "how's". But what we are is terribly important knowledge to have. If we have properties of a hologram than we are all connected, we all contain the entire picture. When I gaze at my 60" high definition television the picture is crystal clear. However, if I magnified it down to just one pixel nothing would make sense. I suspect this is why things break down for us at the quantum level, we can never go small enough, eventually it will just become a blur. When we believe we are an individual that isn't part of the bigger picture, and possess the bigger picture within us, then we have squandered an amazing gift.
Entanglement, double slit experiment, black holes, wave functions and frequencies all fit nicely into the holographic model. Mass, something many countries are spending millions to understand, makes a lot more sense. Obviously, this theory isn't perfect and needs to iron out some things, but what theory doesn't, especially one that is relatively new? And it has gained a ton of traction with some very respected scientists, this isn't just some fringe idea that isn't being taken seriously.
We stare at our computer all day long and it is nothing more than 0's and 1's. It isn't what it seems until it gets into our head. Nor is our tv screen, nor the voice on the other end of the phone, the music in your car, nor the video game that comes to life, they are all just waves and frequencies and 0's and 1's. Things all around you, in your everyday life, are mostly made of nothing or not what it seems and it all feels so counter intuitive to think of it any other way than the way we sense it. But our senses are the least reliable tool to understand the nature of the universe. They're not even particularly good at doing what they're supposed to do, compared with many other animals that have more keen senses. Pilots train in simulators. Have you gone to the theater and witnessed Avatar? Take off the glasses and look at the screen, it isn't what it seems. Put them on and the light hitting a flat surface creates an incredibly real sensation. We know we can be fooled.
I have no idea how it all works. I find it exciting that we have the desire to know, no other animal occupies its time wondering why they exist. In the end, it only really matters to me so we can enjoy this short little ride, holographic or not. The more we know about ourselves, the more we discover the truth about what we are, the easier it is to understand how to make ourselves happy. If we accept what the universe puts in front of us instead of fighting back every step of the way, against every change, against every difference, then our journey might be more enjoyable.
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." ~ Carl Sagan
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