In 1982, a remarkable event happened. At the University of Paris, a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect has conducted what could be one of the most significant experiments in the 20th century. You didn't hear about it on the evening news. In fact, if you are not in the habit of reading scientific journals, chances are you have not even heard the name Alain Aspect, although some scientists believe that his discovery could change the face of science.
Aspect and his team found that under certain conditions, elementary particles, such as electrons, are able to instantly communicate with each other, regardless of the distance between them. It doesn't matter if it's 10 feet between them or 10 billion miles. Somehow, each particle always knows what the other is doing.
The problem with this discovery is that it violates Einstein's postulate about the maximum speed of propagation of interaction equal to the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has led some physicists to try to explain Aspect's experiments in complex roundabout ways. But others have been inspired to offer even more radical explanations.
For example, the physicist at the University of London David Bohm believed that the discovery of Aspect implies that objective reality does not exist, that, despite its apparent density, the universe is fundamentally a phantasm, a gigantic, luxuriously detailed hologram.
To understand why Bohm made such a startling conclusion, it must be said about holograms.
A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph taken with a laser. To make a hologram, first of all, the photographed object must be illuminated with laser light. Then the second laser beam, adding up with the reflected light from the object, gives an interference pattern that can be fixed on the film. The finished shot looks like a meaningless alternation of light and dark lines. But it is worth illuminating the picture with another laser beam, as a three-dimensional image of the original object immediately appears.
Three-dimensionality is not the only wonderful property inherent in a hologram. If a rose hologram is cut in half and illuminated with a laser, each half will contain a whole image of the same rose in exactly the same size. If we continue to cut the hologram into smaller pieces, on each of them we will again find the image of the entire object as a whole. Unlike conventional photography, each section of the hologram contains information about the entire subject, but with a proportional reduction in clarity.
The principle of the hologram "everything in every part" allows us to approach the issue of organization and orderliness in a fundamentally new way. For most of its history, Western science has evolved with the idea that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, be it a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its constituent parts. The hologram showed us that some things in the universe defy exploration in this way. If we dissect something that is holographically arranged, we will not get the parts that make it up, but we will get the same thing, but with less precision.
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This approach inspired Bohm to reinterpret Aspect's work. Bohm was sure that elementary particles interact at any distance, not because they exchange some mysterious signals among themselves, but because their separation is illusory. He explained that at some deeper level of reality, such particles are not separate objects, but in fact extensions of something more fundamental.
To clarify this better, Bohm offered the following illustration.
Imagine a fish tank. Imagine also that you cannot see the aquarium directly, but you can only watch two television screens, which transmit images from cameras located one in front and the other on the side of the aquarium. Looking at the screens, you can conclude that the fish on each screen are separate objects. Since cameras transmit images from different angles, fish look different. But, continuing to observe, after a while you will find that there is a relationship between the two fish on different screens. When one fish turns, the other also changes direction, slightly differently, but always according to the first; when you see one fish full-face, the other is certainly in profile. If you do not have a complete picture of the situation, you are more likely to conclude that the fish must somehow instantly communicate with each other,than that it's a coincidence.
Bohm argued that this is exactly what happens to elementary particles in the Aspect experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent superluminal interaction between particles tells us that there is a deeper level of reality hidden from us, of a higher dimension than ours, as in the aquarium analogy. And, he adds, we see the particles as separate because we see only part of reality. The particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper unity that is ultimately as holographic and invisible as the rose mentioned above. And since everything in physical reality consists of these "phantoms", the universe we observe is itself a projection, a hologram.
In addition to its "phantom" nature, such a universe may have other amazing properties. If the apparent separation of particles is an illusion, then at a deeper level, all objects in the world can be infinitely interconnected. The electrons in the carbon atoms in our brains are linked to the electrons of every floating salmon, every beating heart, every twinkling star. Everything interpenetrates with everything, and although it is human nature to separate, dismember, sort out all the phenomena of nature, all divisions are artificial by necessity, and nature ultimately appears as an endless web. In the holographic world, even time and space cannot be taken as a basis. Because a characteristic such as position is meaningless in a universe where nothing is actually separate from each other;time and three-dimensional space, like images of fish on screens, will need to be considered nothing more than projections. On this deeper level, reality is something like a superhologram, in which the past, present and future exist simultaneously. This means that with the help of the appropriate tools, it may be possible to penetrate deep into this super-hologram and extract pictures of a long forgotten past.
What else a hologram can carry is still far from known. Suppose, for example, that a hologram is a matrix that gives rise to everything in the world, at least it contains all the elementary particles that have taken or will once take any possible form of matter and energy, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It is like a universal supermarket that has everything.
While Bohm admitted that we have no way of knowing what else the hologram is, he took the liberty of arguing that we have no reason to assume that there is nothing else in it. In other words, it is possible that the holographic level of the world is just one of the stages of endless evolution.
Bohm is not alone in his quest to explore the properties of the holographic world. Independently, Stanford University neuroscientist Karl Pribram, who works in brain research, is also leaning towards a holographic view of the world. Pribram came to this conclusion while pondering the riddle of where and how memories are stored in the brain. Numerous experiments over the decades have shown that information is not stored in a specific part of the brain, but is dispersed throughout the brain. In a series of crucial experiments in the 1920s, brain researcher Karl Lashley discovered that no matter which part of the rat's brain he removed, he could not achieve the disappearance of conditioned reflexes developed in the rat before surgery. The only problem was that no one could offer a mechanism,explaining this funny property of memory "everything in every part".
Later, in the 60s, Pribram faced the principle of holography and realized that he had found the explanation that neurophysiologists were looking for. Pribram is convinced that memory is not contained in neurons or groups of neurons, but in a series of nerve impulses that "entwine" the brain, just as a laser beam "wraps around" a piece of a hologram containing the entire image. In other words, Pribram believes that the brain is a hologram.
Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in such a small volume. It is assumed that the human brain is able to memorize about 10 billion bits in a lifetime (which corresponds approximately to the amount of information contained in 5 sets of the British Encyclopedia).
It was discovered that another striking feature was added to the properties of holograms - the enormous recording density. By simply changing the angle at which the lasers illuminate the film, many different images can be recorded on the same surface. It has been shown that one cubic centimeter of film can store up to 10 billion bits of information.
Our supernatural ability to quickly find the necessary information from the huge volume of our memory becomes more understandable if we accept that the brain works on the principle of a hologram. If a friend asks you what came to your mind with the word “zebra,” you don't have to mechanically go through your entire vocabulary to find the answer. Associations like "striped", "horse" and "lives in Africa" appear in your head instantly.
Indeed, one of the most amazing properties of human thinking is that every piece of information is instantaneously and mutually correlated with every other - another quality inherent in a hologram. Since any part of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with any other, it is quite possible that it is the highest natural example of cross-correlated systems.
The location of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that has become more solvable in light of the Pribram holographic brain model. Another is how the brain is able to translate such an avalanche of frequencies that it perceives by various senses (frequencies of light, sound frequencies, and so on) into our concrete idea of the world. Frequency encoding and decoding is exactly what the hologram does best. Just as a hologram serves as a kind of lens, a transmission device capable of transforming a seemingly meaningless jumble of frequencies into a coherent image, so the brain, according to Pribram, contains such a lens and uses the principles of holography to mathematically process frequencies from the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.
A lot of evidence suggests that the brain uses the principle of holography to function. The Pribram theory finds more and more supporters among neurophysiologists.
Argentine-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model to the area of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can determine the direction of a sound source without turning their heads, even if only one ear is working, Zucarelli found that the principles of holography could explain this ability as well.
He also developed holophonic sound recording technology capable of reproducing soundscapes with near-supernatural realism.
Pribram's idea that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input frequencies has also received brilliant experimental support. It has been found that any of our senses has a much wider frequency response than previously thought. For example, researchers have found that our organs of vision are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is somewhat dependent on what are now called "osmotic frequencies," and that even our cells are sensitive to a wide range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that this is the work of the holographic part of our consciousness, which transforms separate chaotic frequencies into continuous perception.
But the most striking aspect of Pribram's holographic brain model comes to light when compared to Bohm's theory. Because if the apparent physical density of the world is only a secondary reality, and what is "there" is in fact only a holographic set of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some frequencies from this set and mathematically transforms them into sensory perception, what remains to the lot of objective reality?
Let's put it simply - it ceases to exist. As Eastern religions have been claiming from time immemorial, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think that we are physical and moving in the physical world, this is also an illusion.
In fact, we are “receivers” floating in a kaleidoscopic sea of frequencies, and everything that we extract from this sea and turn into physical reality is just one frequency channel out of many, extracted from the hologram.
This striking new picture of reality, a synthesis of the views of Bohm and Pribram, is called the holographic paradigm, and while many scientists were skeptical, others were inspired by it. A small but growing group of researchers believe that this is one of the most accurate models of the world so far proposed. Moreover, some hope that it will help solve some of the mysteries that have not been previously explained by science and even consider the paranormal as part of nature.
Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, conclude that many parapsychological phenomena are becoming more understood in terms of the holographic paradigm.
In a universe in which the separate brain is actually an indivisible part, the “quantum” of the large hologram, and everything is infinitely connected to everything, telepathy may simply be attainment of the holographic level. It becomes much easier to understand how information can be delivered from consciousness "A" to consciousness "B" at any distance, and to explain many mysteries of psychology. In particular, Grof envisions that the holographic paradigm could offer a model for explaining many of the mysterious phenomena observed by humans in altered states of consciousness.
While researching LSD as a psychotherapeutic drug in the 1950s, Grof worked with a patient who suddenly became convinced that she was a female prehistoric reptile. During the hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it was like to be such a creature, but also noted colored scales on the head of a male of the same species. Grof was amazed by the fact that in a conversation with a zoologist, the presence of colored scales on the head of reptiles was confirmed, which plays an important role in mating games, although the woman had no idea about such subtleties before.
This woman's experience was not unique. During his research, Grof encountered patients returning up the evolutionary ladder and identifying themselves with a wide variety of species (based on which the scene of the transformation of a man into an ape in the movie Altered States is built). Moreover, he found that such descriptions often contain little-known zoological details that, when checked, are accurate.
The return to animals is not the only phenomenon described by Grof. He also had patients who seemed to be able to tap into some sort of area of the collective or racial unconscious. Uneducated or poorly educated people suddenly gave detailed descriptions of burials in Zoroastrian practice or scenes of Hindu mythology. In other experiments, people gave convincing descriptions of out-of-body travel, predictions of future pictures, events of past incarnations.
In later research, Grof found that the same range of phenomena manifested itself in drug-free therapy sessions. Since a common element of such experiments was the expansion of individual consciousness beyond the usual limits of the ego and the boundaries of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experience", and in the late 60s, thanks to him, a new branch of psychology called "transpersonal" psychology appeared, entirely devoted to this area.
Although Grof's Association for Transpersonal Psychology was a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and became a respected branch of psychology, neither Grof himself nor his colleagues could offer a mechanism for explaining the strange psychological phenomena they observed for many years. But this ambiguous situation changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.
As Grof recently noted, if consciousness is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth, connected not only to every other consciousness that exists or existed, but also to every atom, organism and an immense region of space and time, its ability to accidentally tunnel in the labyrinth and experience transpersonal the experience no longer seems so strange.
The holographic paradigm also leaves its mark on the so-called exact sciences, such as biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has shown that if reality is just a holographic illusion, then it can no longer be argued that consciousness is a function of the brain. Rather, on the contrary, consciousness creates the presence of a brain - just as we interpret the body and our entire environment as physical.
This reversal of our views on biological structures allowed researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process may also change under the influence of the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is nothing more than a holographic projection of our consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than modern medicine believes. What we are now seeing as a mysterious cure, in reality, could have occurred due to a change in consciousness, which made appropriate adjustments to the body hologram.
Likewise, new alternative therapies, such as visualization, may work so well precisely because in holographic reality, thought is ultimately just as real as "reality."
Even the revelations and experiences of the "otherworldly" become explicable in terms of the new paradigm. Biologist Lyall Watson in his book "Gifts of the Unknown" describes a meeting with an Indonesian woman-shaman, who, performing a ritual dance, was able to make a whole grove of trees disappear instantly into the subtle world. Watson writes that while he and another surprised bystander continued to watch her, she caused the trees to disappear and appear several times in a row.
Although modern science is unable to explain such phenomena, they become quite logical if we assume that our "dense" reality is nothing more than a holographic projection. Perhaps we can formulate the concepts of "here" and "there" more precisely if we define them at the level of the human unconscious, in which all consciousnesses are infinitely closely interconnected.
If this is the case, then, overall, this is the most significant consequence of the holographic paradigm, since it means that the phenomena observed by Watson are not publicly available just because our minds are not programmed to trust them to make them so. In the holographic universe, there are no limits to the possibilities for changing the fabric of reality.
What we perceive as reality is just a canvas waiting for US to apply on it any picture we wish. Everything is possible, from bending spoons with an effort of will to the phantasmagoric experiences of Castaneda in his studies with Don Juan, because magic is given to us by birthright, no more and no less wonderful than our ability to create new worlds in our dreams and fantasies.
Of course, even our most "fundamental" knowledge is suspicious, because in holographic reality, as Pribram showed, even random events must be viewed using holographic principles and resolved in this way. Synchronisms or coincidences suddenly take on meaning, and anything can be considered a metaphor, since even a chain of chance events can express some kind of deep symmetry.
Whether the Bohm and Pribram holographic paradigm gains universal scientific acceptance or disappears into oblivion, it is safe to say that it has already influenced the way of thinking of many scientists. And even if the holographic model is found to be unsatisfactory in describing instantaneous particle interactions, at least as Birbeck College physicist Basil Hiley points out, Aspect's discovery "showed that we must be prepared to consider radically new approaches to understanding reality."
Comments of the author of another version of the Russian translation
I heard the message about this discovery from an intelligent person around 1994, albeit in a slightly different interpretation. The experience was described something like this. The stream of elementary particles passed a certain path and hit the target. In the middle of this path, some characteristics of the particles were measured, obviously those whose measurement does not have a significant effect on their further fate. As a result, it was found that the results of these measurements depend on what events occur with the particle in the target. In other words, the particle somehow "knows" what will happen to it in the near future. This experience makes us seriously think about the validity of the postulates of the theory of relativity in relation to particles, and also remember about Nostradamus …
Author: Ellie Crystal, Translation: Irina Mirzuitova