Holograms

Not very long ago I wrote a post on consciousness. Admittedly it is a subject about which there are an extraordinary number of theories and among them is one which has been taken up by both legitimate scientists as well as writers of popular science fiction, such as Cixin Liu, whose Three Body Problem is an outstanding example. The question can be posed many different ways but ultimately concerns the nature of reality and our assumptions and understanding of our relation to the universe. Is the universe as we know it real, and if so is it what we perceive or something quite different? Do we ourselves exist in the form our senses suggest or are we merely a form of energy floating in a virtual reality, a hologram?

Emerging from string theory and quantum physics, the universe as hologram concept is not easily explained, especially if one has a limited understanding of the science behind it. So I approach this conversation with some trepidation and a caveat that I have vastly over simplified a construct that is both highly complex and mind bending in its implications. With that admission, let me offer a summary statement to ponder.

What if space--the planets, galaxies, all that is observable about our own reality, and all that surrounds us, all of our three dimensional world is in fact just a projection mapped on some distant two dimensional surface, or in other words a hologram? Are we reflections as in Plato's Phaedo, shadows cast by firelight on the cave's wall or something more?

Readers of Edwin Abbot's wonderful novella, Flatland, may have an inkling of what that statement portends. Although written as a satire on the narrow perspectives of Victorian life, Abbot's book plays with our sense of reality asking us to suspend what our senses tell us and imagine a wholly different proposition.

An equally compelling book, Einstein's Dreams, written by Alan Lightman, a Harvard and MIT professor and poet is another thought experiment in imagined realities. Lightman undertook the novel as a way of making a related subject, the physics of relativity, accessible to those who were not physicists. It imagines a series of dreams that Einstein experienced in 1905 while working at the patent office in Berne, Switzerland. Each of these dreams casts Einstein's daily life and the characters surrounding it into a different reality, one in which time has properties far different from those we commonly accept. In one story, there is no past or future, only the present, while in another events repeat themselves endlessly like a hall of mirrors reflecting infinity.

I highly recommend both books as a way to begin a thought experiment--one that stands on its head our accepted views of the universe and reality. For those wanting a deeper plunge into the subject, Aristotle might be the place to begin, starting with the exoteric and esoteric texts on the nature of matter, and the nature of existence. It isn't everyone's cup of tea, but is surely the seminal written expression of humankind's exploration of the very same questions that occupy cosmologists' thoughts today.

If you are expecting an answer to any of the questions I posed above I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am fascinated by the anomalies and patterns emerging in theoretical physics about the nature of what we have largely considered to be an ordered world with certain fixed rules about how things operate. You may already know that quantum mechanics gives the lie to many of our assumptions, suggesting that what Einstein labeled "spooky actions at a distance", the paradoxical behavior of matter at the subatomic level is both provable and confounding. It appears that particles are sometimes waves, that they can be in more than one place at the same time, that they can indeed influence each other over great distances--and those are just a few of the reality bending findings that have emerged.

With this in mind how sure can we be that what our limited human senses tell us is real is nothing more than a projection, a common illusion, a delusion or a product of our fevered imagination? Speaking for myself, I am not ready to bang the gavel on hologram theory, but neither am I ready to dismiss it out of hand. It seems we should place less trust in our experience of the universe than we suppose and rather than finding that a disturbing idea, I am excited at the prospect.