This is powerful stuff, worth reading. I think you'll enjoy.
It reveals some deep insights into the nature of the universe,
and what's beyond. It's relevant to a number of discussions
that have occurred on this list recently.
[Thanks to whoever posted part of it on one of the TM mailing lists
recently and inspired me to find and read the whole essay.]
The Holographic Universe
By Michael Talbot
http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html
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 alw
