PulpMind

Author unknown

Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm
offers the following illustration.

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.

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.

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.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the
subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

PulpMind

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.

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."

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 every other portion, it is perhaps
nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

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.

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.

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.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic
sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic
situations with an almost uncanny realism.

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.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a
much broader range of frequencies than was previously
suspected.

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 "osmic
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.

PulpMind

Part 3 ...
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?

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.

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.

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.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted
that many para-psychological phenomena become much more
understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

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.

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.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of
LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient
who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of
a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the
course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly
detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in
such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the
species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side
of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no
prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a
zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles
colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as
triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of
his research, Grof encountered examples of patients
regressing and identifying with virtually every species on
the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped
influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered
States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently
contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be
accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only
puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also
had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective
or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no
education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian
funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other
categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive
accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of
the future, of regressions into apparent past-life
incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena
manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use
of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences
appeared to be the transcending of an individual's
consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or
limitations of space and time, Grof called such
manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late
'60s he helped found a branch of psychology called
"transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal
Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded
professionals and has become a respected branch of
psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues
were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre
psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has
changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a
continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every
other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom,
organism, and region in the vastness of space and time
itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays
into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no
longer seems so strange.

The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called
hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at
Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the
concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it
would no longer be true to say the brain produces
consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the
appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything
else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has
caused researchers to point out that medicine and our
understanding of the healing process could also be
transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent
physical structure of the body is but a holographic
projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us
is much more responsible for our health than current medical
wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of
disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which
in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as
visualization may work so well because in the holographic
domain of thought images are ultimately as real as "reality".

Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality
become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his
book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson
discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who,
by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire
grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates
that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch
the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off
again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of
explaining such events, experiences like this become more
tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because
what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at
the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are
infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the
holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences
such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not
programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them
so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the
extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us
to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible,
from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the
phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his
encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our
birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to
compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

PulpMind

Final
Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality
become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has
pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as
based on holographic principles and therefore determined.
Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes
sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a
metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express
some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes
accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be
seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an
influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it
is found that the holographic model does not provide the best
explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to
be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the
very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck
College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must
be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

-----
"Today young men on acid realize that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration and we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves! Here's Tom with the weather."
-Bill Hicks

"The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while.
Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride?

And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "hey- don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride..."

And we... kill those people.

'Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.'

Just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because: It's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger
locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defences each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one
human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace."
-Bill Hicks

Lebell

Powerful article about something I've never heard postulated before.

Thanks for posting it and do you have a link for it?

__________________
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU!

Please Donate!

CSflim

I didn't read it all, but I will point out that the non-local reality has been known about WAY before 1982.
It it often reffered to as the EPR (Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen) paradox.
Quantum wave funstion collapse is well know to be instananeous even over long distances.
The important thing is that once the wave function collapse occurs, the particles are no longer in an entangled linear superposition.
Exactly what causes the wave function collapse is unknown as of yet, and is a hotly debated topic.
The way I tend to view it is that particles which are described by a wave function simply do not exist. The WAVES exist, not the particles. As the waves interact they become more and more complex. at a certain point the waves collapse after reaching some limit...a limit in the complexity of the wave (the decoherence principle) or a limit in the amount of energy (quantum gravity).
After the wave collapses, the entrangled waves, instantaneously "become" particles.
In other words I view quantum wave function collapse as a purely objective phenomena, entirely independant of our observation. I think the problem with the "observer dependant reality" model of quantum physics is that it suffers from the logical fallacy of confusing cause and correlation.
Anyway, once the wave function collapses, the particles are no longer in instantaneous communication. In fact, as I described, they never were. Their corresponding waves were, but not the particles.
In fact even to reffer to it as "communication" is a bit chairitible.
Einstein showed how faster than light speed communications would throw out all sorts of hideous paradoxes with regards to relativity.
The "communication" of quantum wave functions however does not cause these paradoxes. I'd have to go into too much detail to explain why, but they are not ruled out by relativity.

The article then goes on making statements about the holographic nature of the universe which could be considered speculative at best.

__________________

debaser

Good article in Scientific American about the subject, too.

__________________

Ierre Il

I agree with CSflim, what you're discussing in the first part appears to be quantum entanglement, with an interesting explanation... No analogy is required to compare it to a hologram, as its basically the same thing, with everything as waves. This is really unclearly written, because it's nearly 4 am. Bleh.
Anyway... I'd agree that the idea that a holographic universe implies subjectivism seems to be, at the least, incompletely developed, and somewhat questionable. Nonetheless, without the subjectivism, it is an interesting theory.
Just a random association my tired mind has thrown up, would this complete divisibility into innumerable wholes correlate at all with the universe apparently being the same at every point?

As to the scientific american article, that's different... It's talking about the universe being 2 dimensional and appearing 3d, not quantum wave phenomena. I though it was a bit flawed anyway, as it works from the entropy of a black hole, a very special case, and then extrapolates to the entire universe... may be the biggest generalisation I've seen published in a scientific magazine. But then, SciAm has been known to popularize concepts a little, so maybe they didn't do the idea justice... someone else here could explain it, if they know why it works?

Shpoop

Now CSFilm, im not entirely sure what you are talking about, nor do i pretend to be, but you said that "once waves reach a limit (like energy) they collapse and instantaneously become particles"

For sure, has been proved, E =MC^2 ... anything with enough energy can be converted to mass, just has to be ALOT of energy (the certain things limit) That is why 'supposedly' it is impossible for most things to travel faster than light, because that is the energy limit, and once you try to accelerate it further, it adds to the mass instead of the speed

but once again, im not sure what you were talkin about

Johnny Rotten

And to think Hicks was a comedian by trade. You can see him perform these bits in an HBO special he did just a couple years before he died. I can't find it on Amazon, so you may have to investigate some alternate means of acquisition. But it's worth it. His whole catalog of CDs is worth it, IMO.

Getting back on the subject, though, that's definitely some food for thought. I'm surprised the holographic paradigm meme hasn't propogated, since the aquarium analogy is quite accessible. In all of my reading of ghost stories and other phenomena, I've never come across the term, or even the idea behind it. I was also aware of the LSD research, but only exposed to the popularized, pulp sci-fi version. I'll have to check that out in depth.

As to the author of the piece, it was posted anonymously to a BBS back in 1991, and he or she has never come forward, despite seven Google pages still listing the title of the article.

__________________
"The idea that money doesn't buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich, to stop the poor from killing them." -- Michael Caine

CSflim

No, you're thinking of something else. The limit that must be broken is something quite small.
I'm not talking about energy being iconverted into particles, I'm talking about the ordinary low energy particles that we are familliar with on a daily basis.

At the quantum level, the levels of energy we are talking about are so small that we cannot directly detect them. To indirectly detect them we must "make a measurement", which is another way of saying "magnify its energy to macroscopic levels".

To give you a solid example, think of a geiger counter. This is a device for measuring radioactive decay. When it detects a particle, it lets out a loud click.
This loud click has a relatively high level of energy. Some where between the quantum level of the atom being in a superposition of decaying and not decaying, and the geiger counter clicking, the system has crossed some "limit", where the quantum wave stops behaving as a superposition, and starts behaving as a definite particle.
Passing this "limit" is reffered to as quantum wave function collapse, and we don't really know what causes it,
some people see it as being entirely subjective, in other words, it is our conscious hearing of the click, that causes it. Me, I think that's quite an unhelpful way of looking at things, and see the phenomenna as something real and objective.
As for what this "limit" is...well it could be anything...energy seems to sound likely though.

__________________

marshall26

I am so absolutely fascinated by that article...does anyone have a link for it?

Johnny Rotten

It's actually a piece that has been circulated for more than ten years, sadly without attribution, and no one has come forward to claim it. As far as I know, it did not initially appear in any publication, but was submitted to a BBS in 1991 (although it may have been around before that). At least one person claims to have seen the article with its attribution, but that last part got carelessly stripped during its many rotations around the email boxes of the world. I think it gives the article a sparkle of mystery.

Loki

??? I thought that under einsteins theory, the maximum speed for anything was the speed of light.

PulpMind

well then, read the article

I love this article... I'm not sure how much of it to accept, as it's really scratching the surface of things I'm sure we havn't even begun to comprehend... but... it's implications, and the direction it takes our entirely-too-concrete way of thinking.. I love it...

CSflim

Well, it depends on how you define "anything".
No particle or signal can travel faster than the speed of light.
Wave function collapse is neither.

Wish I could be a bit more specific, but I would have to go into far too much detail.

__________________

Johnny Rotten

Aw, you can't stop there!

Do you have any links handy that could point to a layman-friendly explanation?

Loki

no offense or anything, but could you go into far too much detail?

or point me to a source where i can learn the detail.

CSflim

Loki and Johnny Rotten.

I don't know of any website, but I will keep my eyes open, and have a quick search around later on.

I could attempt to breifly explain, but first I would like to know just what your understandings of relativity and quantum mechanics are? I don't want to spend ages expaling about things that you already know.

Do you understand why things cannot go faster than light?
Do you understand the paradoxes involved, such as events causing events which cause themselves?

Do you understand what a quantum wave function is?
Do you see that a "particle" doesn't exist while it is in a state described by a quantum wave function?
Do you understand what wave function collapse is?

once I know this, I will be able to briefly explain.

__________________

Johnny Rotten

As the speed of matter approaches c, relative time slows to a stop. At c, matter theoretically consists of infinite density and zero mass (IIRC). And time freezes, relatively. It is theoretically impossible for matter to have those properties. Yet there are tachyons, which appear to move faster than light.

Particles in a quantum wave function only potentially exist, and their location or vector (according to Heisenberg) cannot be determined until the particle is observed. And once observation ceases, they resume potentiality.

You can predict that an electron will be orbiting the nucleus at a given distance, but it could be anywhere on that spherical target area. So it exists anywhere on that sphere--and nowhere, if you're not observing it.

That's about the upper limit of my understanding. Wave function collapse is the one I haven't studied.

__________________
"The idea that money doesn't buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich, to stop the poor from killing them." -- Michael Caine

rogue49

Read it years ago.

The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot
in 1991

Interesting concept, good read.
I'm still not sure about it though...needs a bit more to it.

Also interesting that it's just now catching on,
back when I read it, it was still considered slightly "unscientific".

ObieX

I love this kinda stuff.

I think i have heard of this concept before, but i never saw it explained out in so much detail. I was real young back in '91 though (21 now) so even if it was explained to me at that point i wouldnt have gotten a bunch of it anyway.

I especially enjoyed the correlation between the way the brain works and the holographic universe.

__________________
We Must Dissent.

CSflim

Well with that amount of knowledge, it should be reasonably easy to explain.

Just one thing "wave function collapse" is just a fancy way of saying "making an observation" or "measuring". It is also sometimes referred to as state vector reduction.

First of all, as you approach light speed, time appears to slow down for you. At faster than light speed, it will seem that a signal will propagate backwards in time.

Suppose we have a person at A, who sends a faster than light signal to B, who then returns that message to A, again at faster than light speed, A will receive this message before he sends it....a very obvious paradox.

Now, we have to ask the question, can we arrive at the same paradox using the instantaneous wave function collapse (obviously faster than light).

Well, first we have to explain, exactly what the wave function is, and what it means to "measure it".

Some people see this as being a purely subjective matter. The wave function is nothing more than a mathematical description of our knowledge of the system. As time passes, our knowledge of this system reduces, and so the wave function grows. Each possible "state" for the system gets superimposed together into one big state.
So if we don't know if a system is in state A, or B, we refer to it as being in the linear superposition of A (+/-) B.
When we "measure" the system, and we determine that the system is in fact NOT in A, but is in B, we have reduced the state vector to just B.
There is no objective reality to the wave function, or its collapse. They are both merely mathematical abstractions of our knowledge of said system.

This is not how I choose to interpret it. As I explained above, I see the wave function as being something very definite and objective, and I also see the "measurement" of a system being something definite.

Anyway, we can try and use this wave function to send a signal.

What we can do is let a particle decay into two photons. The overall spin of the original particle was W. As spin is conserved, we know that the spin of particle A (Y) plus the spin of the other particle B (Z) adds up to W. For simplicity, we'll say W = 0, so Y=-Z.

At the moment however, both particles are in an undefined state. We don't know the actual values of the spins, but we know their sums. As such, by measuring one, we can know the other.

We keep particle A with us, and we send particle B to a further location.
We now wish to send our message.
Particle A is in an undefined state |Y>.
We don't know the angle of Y.
We can't actually "ask" the particle the question "what is your angle of polarization", we can only ask yes/no questions, such as "is this your angle of polarization"?

We test particle A for an angle of ß.
We will have a 50/50 chance of getting a YES to this angle.

However, once this measurement is made, B will automatically JUMP to the orthogonal state.

In other words, suppose we measure A for an angle of ß, and we are given a YES.
We will now know with certainty, that B will give a NO for a test of ß.
Somehow B now "knows" that A has been measured! This "knowledge" has travelled an arbitrarily long distance, instantaneously.

But the question is, can we send a signal with it?
Well actually, no we can't.
At Bs end, all we will get is either a YES or a NO.
We can get the signal, only through "comparing notes" with the results from particlae A.
So, if we repeated the experiment a number of times, we might observe the following results:

Results for B:
YES, YES, NO, YES, NO.

and when we correlate them with A, we will see the "signal"

Results for A:
NO, NO, YES, NO, YES.

so, we get no problems with causality there!

Now you might take the approach that maybe A and B's spin we not actually undefined, but rather simply unknown? This is of course the most obvious reaction. However, this too can be proven wrong...

..but maybe later. I'm tired! I'll post again later!

__________________

josobot

I'm lost with the physics, but suspect that we are having a modern day version arguement over Plato's distinction between matter and form. Although near all can be mathematically expressed by Wolfram and binary code. That form is not the thing. The information is not the thing and it is next to nothing without a "writer" and a "reader". Being part of the system as we write and read information, we will never be purely objective. And without ourselves the information is useless, it just describes what is.

skinbag

I found this post after discussions with a friend who subscribes to Scientific American. I can't understand this fully through my understanding of science, being mathematically-challenged as I am, but as a Buddhist I actually pointed out that lately science seems to be borrowing ancient descriptions of the universe and re-hashing them in science's own terms. It really seems that quantum mechanics breaks down into religion to me. As I said, I can't do the math, so my access is impaired. If some people have perecieved this "holographic" reality directly, it follows that we would eventually get the tools to confirm it. I appreciate this discussion for the "reality" of it. The hologram metephor sits well with my daily experiences. That's how it feels to me, science or no science. Having said that, I think that for anything to be accepted by the collective consciousness it should be appropriately examined with science. Consentual reality is not the proper place for everyday mysticysm. I really believe that this debate will eventually dispel the delusions of ego which are the bane of civililized living. Proper understanding of reality leads to proper action in reality. Thanks for the engaging posts.

CSflim

What makes you come to that conclusion?

EDIT: Wasn't being a smart arse by the way, if that's the way it sounded!

__________________

josobot

QUOTE]Originally posted by CSflim
[B]What makes you come to that conclusion?

To be imperfectly honest, I think I'm begging what I assume is the question. First, what will I find out when, I know "everything"? Or second, can I know everything about reality. I am assuming the only answer will be: I am part of the universe. All other options[including the second formulation] depend on a God, truthful or deceptive or on my living an illusion. Of course, I also don't believe I am a god--just god-like and mortal. I think the halogram model may accurately describe the brain as it has functioned for perhaps millions of years. But it is the other aspect of TFProject that defines my reality. Because of sex, I am part of the chain of human consciousness. If humans didn't exist, the universe still would exist; but it would have its eyes closed- as a fetus. Sorry for overly mixed metaphors.

CSflim

Just another thing, I would like to point out that what the author points out about holograms is quite misleading.

Yes this is true, but each half will create a reconstruction of lower fidelity than that of the whole hologram.

In other words, holograms don't have some "magical" property that allows them to hold more information in them then their constituent parts.

Certainly there is no one to one correlation of points on the rose to points on the surface of the hologram, but that doens't really mean anything.

It would be like taking an interlaced gif.
If you take the whole file, you will get an image. But if you just take the first half of the file, you will get that same image...but at a lower resolution.

An interlaced gif, is one of those images that you may have seen on a website. A normal gif will start to load at the top, and will load down to give you the full image.
An interlaced gif will start by giving you a very pixelated version of the image, which then steadily gets clearer and clearer. A hologram is like this.

Obviously it would be silly to say that the encoding of a progressive gif has some property which allows it to encode more information than a normal gif.

There are more fallacies such as this in the article, and I will post more later. (tired!)

__________________

Booboo

I really enjoyed reading this article.. thank you for posting it. great discussions as well.

__________________
"Your life is yours to live, go out and live it" - Richard Rahl

fnordprefect

I read the Micheal Talbot book back in the early '90s and it blew me away at the time (I was 15 or 16 at the time). Looking back there was a lot of New-Age mumbo jumbo in it about how this could account for all kinds of unexplained phenomena like ESP.
The problem is that ESP is a non-existent phenomena! So it doesn't need explaining. I can't think of any proper scientific trials where it has been empirically demonstrated.
David Bohm wrote a very heavy book explaining his theory which I have attempted to read a few times but without much success. I got the impression that he is a very very smart, but very very weird guy.
For anyone interested it's called "Wholeness and the Implicate order"
Implicate order was his name for the larger reality that underlay our "holographic" universe.

desdes

Ideas like this are what push science into new bounderies... or in this case, realities.

Thanks for the read.

CSflim

Don't bother! Biggest waste of time in my life!
All was going well for David Bohm when he came up with Bohmian mechanics, then he went insane...sorry, I mean he became a mystic.

__________________

ForgottenKnight

Very intriguing article. I love it. I love ideas that push the boudries of reality to things greater and unexpected. It will be interesting to see if the holographic state of the universe's existence is ever proven to be correct, or even on the right track. Thanks for posting!

__________________
"People say I'm strange, does that make me a stranger?"

Johnny Rotten

Scientific trials, no. Government experimentation, yes, in the form of Project Deep Black Magic. There's also Project Stargate, which was about remote viewing, and MKULTRA, which involved mind control, to name a few.

Some more interesting info here, collated by Dr. Steven Hale, a professor at a university in Georgia.

CSflim

These experimwnts investigated thse phenomena. There is absolutely no evidence that they actually found anything supernatural.

Remote viewing has been repeatedly falsified in any case where the "psychic" actually became so convinced of his own bullshit that he actually agreed to take part in the experiment.

Don't reply with all of these amazing things which have some profound pschological implications. I am only interested in things which are manifestations of "supernatural" things.
Remote viewing is one of them, and has never passed any scientific test.

__________________

fnordprefect

Thanks for the heads up. Next time I'll try a bong hit before chapter 1.

Just out of interest, what are Bohmian mechanics anyway?

CSflim

Basically, Quantum Mechanics appears to be random. Most physicist would tell you that indeed it is random.

Bohm likes quantum randomness to the pseudo-randomness of Brownian motion...if you place a tiny particle into a glass of "still" water, it will jump and dodge all over the place, in an apparently random manner, and apparently defying Newtons deterministic laws of mechanics.

But we know the brownian motion is not random. It just requires a deeper understanding of what exactly a liquid is. It is a whole bunch of particles bouncing around off each other. We can now see that the apparenty randomness of Brownian motion is in fact perfectly deterministic...just very difficult to predict, given the fact that you cannot take the liquid to be "uniform" instead you need to take into account the position of every single particle that makes up that liquid.

Bohm argues that the pseudo-randomness of quantum mechanics is the same. Rather than accepting the randomness, we need to search for a "deeper reality" behind it.
So he proposed the idea of "hidden variables" to account for quantum mechanical behavior, the idea being that the quantities that we can measure are just manifestations of some unmeasurable quanties.

It seemed as good an interpretation of quantum reality as any. Then along came Von Neumann, and other nay-sayers. Von Neumann, the superb mathematician (directly responsible for the architechture of the computer you are using to read this post) came up with his "impossibility proof", a theorem, showing that NO system of hidden variables, could account for the observed effects of quantum mechanics. And so "hidden variables" was pretty much unanimously disregarded by all within the scientific community. Determinism was dead. Quantum randomness ruled.

But Von Neumann HAD NOT in fact disproved the principle of hidden variables. He had made one unfounded assumption. As a result his "impossibility proof" disproves the correctness of any LOCAL hidden variables interpretation. It did not disprove the possibility of a non-local reality. And it is from this that I believe that this thread's main article spawns.

If you let go of your preconcieved notion of "space" and "distance", then it is possible to formulate a theory of hidden variables. This is what Bohm proves in this book. He is not saying that: Here is how the deeper reality of hidden variables works, but rather he is saying: Here is a mathematical model of a non-local reality, which can be shown to be in agreement with quantum mechanical observations.

So in essence, this chapter proves Von Neumann wrong. It is possible to define a reality of "hidden-variables", albeit a non-local one.

__________________

fnordprefect

Thanks CSfilm for a very informative and interesting post. Is there a way to explain von Neumann's proof that doesn't require a PhD and/or and extra 50 on my IQ score?

I've got a B.Sc in Chemistry if you need to know what level of complexity I can cope with.

~fnord

CSflim

Sorry. I don't know the details of Von Neumann's proof.
I haven't studied quantum mechanics, just pursued it at my own lesuire, so my knowledge is very limited when it comes to specifics.

__________________

fnordprefect

Thanks CSfilm. I might pursue it on my own then, when I have some spare brain cycles.