Physics 11th grade
The observable part of the universe may be a complex hologram. The first evidence in favor of a holographic model of the universe has been discovered. A scientist once had a phantasm

The observable part of the universe may be a complex hologram. The first evidence in favor of a holographic model of the universe has been discovered. A scientist once had a phantasm

The year 1982 was marked by an event that turned the world of physics upside down. Alan Aspect and the research team presented an experiment that can be considered one of the most significant experiments conducted in the 20th century.

The aspect together with the group were able to discover that, under certain conditions, elementary particles - electrons - are able to interact with each other instantly. It makes no difference what the distance is between them. The discovery is stunning, but it casts doubt on Einstein's theory that the ultimate speed of interaction is the speed of light. As we know that the speed of light is the fastest speed on our planet and in space.

David Bohm, a physicist at the University of London, believes that the discovery of Aspect has shaken the idea of perceiving the world as a whole. Real reality simply does not exist, and what we are accustomed to perceive as objective reality is nothing more than a huge three-dimensional hologram that has obvious density.

What is a hologram and its amazing properties

A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph made using a laser. To make a hologram, you need to illuminate an object with one laser, and the second laser, emitting a beam, will combine with the light reflected from the object and record the interference pattern on the film. The holographic image looks like alternating white stripes with black stripes. But when the image is illuminated with a laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the object that was photographed appears. Halogram

Three-dimensionality is not the only amazing property of a hologram. You know, if a hologram is cut in half and illuminated, then each half will reproduce the original image. You can cut the hologram into small pieces and each one will reproduce the whole image. The hologram has become a stumbling block in the issue of orderliness of the world. By constantly cutting the hologram, we will always get the original image of a smaller size.

Holographic world

David Bohm suggests that elementary particles interact with each other at any distance not because unusual properties, but because distance is only an illusion. He says that at some level, elementary particles cease to be individual objects, but become part of something huge and fundamental.

Bohm proposed a model that would make it easier to understand his thoughts. Imagine that you are watching an aquarium with fish. However, you cannot see the entire aquarium; you only have access to two screens, which are located on the side and in front of the aquarium. If you look at the screens separately, you can conclude that two objects are being observed. But if you continue to watch, you will notice that there is a relationship between the fish on the two screens. As soon as the first fish changes position, the second one also changes position, in accordance with the first. It turns out that one fish is observed from the front, the second from the profile. If at the same time you remain unaware that this is an aquarium as a whole, then the thought will come to your mind that the fish communicate with each other in an amazing way.

This perception can be transferred to the Aspect experiment; there is superluminal interaction between particles, there is a level of reality that is not yet accessible to humans, because we perceive the world as an aquarium with fish. Only a part of reality is accessible to us, parts are not parts, they are components of a holographic deep unity. Everything that is contained in physical reality is in a huge holographic image, projection.

If we continue to reason further, we can conclude that in the universe all objects are interconnected. It turns out that the electrons of our brain are connected with the electrons of every beating heart, every shining star. Everything is interpenetrated, and man’s desire to divide and dismember everything is artificial; nature is in constant interconnection, like a huge and immense web. Position, as a characteristic, has no meaning in a world where nothing is divided. Three-dimensional space and time are only projections. Present reality is a hologram in which there is no past or future, everything exists in the present moment. If a special tool becomes available to a person, then he can, while in the present, see the events of the past.

Bohm is not the only one who came to the conclusion that reality is a hologram; neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, who works at Stanford University and studies the human brain, is inclined to the theory of a holographic world. Pribram was led to such thoughts by thinking about human memories; there is no separate part in the brain that would be responsible for memories, they are dispersed throughout the brain.

Karl Lashley in the 20s of the last century experimentally proved that in a rat, when various parts of the brain are removed, all the conditioned reflexes that were developed before the operation are preserved. And no one could explain how memory is located in each part of the brain. Then, in the 60s of the last century, Pribram had to face the principle of holography, he explained what other neurophysiologists had been trying to explain for so long. Pribram is confident that memory is not in neurons, but in nerve impulses that circulate throughout the brain, just as a piece of a hologram contains all the information about the image.

A lot of scientific facts they say that the brain is adapted to holographic functioning. Hugo Zucciarelli, an Argentine-Italian researcher, recently discovered a holographic model in acoustics. He was worried about the fact that a person can determine where a sound is coming from, even with one ear. Only the principle of holography can explain this. He developed a technology that recorded sound holophonically, and when listened to, the recording was distinguished by amazing realism.

Pribram's theory that our brains create "solid" objects based on input frequencies has been confirmed. Scientists have determined that the human brain is capable of perceiving frequencies of a larger range. For example, it turned out that a person can “hear” with his eyes; all cells of our body perceive higher frequencies. Human consciousness transforms the chaotic perception of frequencies into a continuous one.

An amazing moment, if Pribram’s holographic theory of the brain is combined with Bohm’s theory, it turns out that a person perceives only a reflection of holographic frequencies that come from something inaccessible to understanding. The human brain is part of a hologram; it selects the frequencies it needs and converts them. It turns out that objective reality does not exist.

Since ancient times, Eastern religions have said that matter is an illusion - Maya. Move to physical world illusion. A person, as a “receiver”, existing in a kaleidoscope of frequencies, selects one source from a huge variety and turns it into physical reality. The ability to read another person's mind may be nothing more than the ability to perceive the holographic level.

This model of the world can explain some amazing phenomena, for example, in the 50s of the last century, LSD was used in psychotherapy. Once, Professor Grof had a woman at a reception, she was given a drug, after a while she began to claim that she was a female dinosaur. When the patient was having hallucinations, she described in detail the perception of the world by another creature and mentioned golden scales on the head of the male. Professor Grof asked zoologists and found out that the golden scales on the heads of reptiles are needed for mating games. The patient knew nothing about this. Grof constantly encountered the fact that his patients returned to the past through the stages of evolution. Later, based on his observations, the film “Altered States” was made. In addition, all the details that the patients told exactly coincided with the biological descriptions of the species.

However, people at Grof’s receptions not only turned into animals, but also demonstrated knowledge that they did not have before. Patients with little or no education began to talk about Zoroastrian funerals or retell scenes from Hindu mythology. It turns out that somehow people could come into contact with the collective unconscious.

At other receptions, people had out-of-body experiences, predicted the future, and talked about their past incarnations. Later, Professor Grof discovered that unusual conditions occur in patients even without the use of drugs. What all patients had in common was the expansion of consciousness and its going beyond the boundaries of time and space. Grof called the experiences of patients “transpersonal”, then a separate branch appeared - transpersonal psychology. Grof has many followers today, but no one can explain the strange phenomena that occur during psychotherapy sessions.

From the point of view of holographic theory, everything becomes clear. If consciousness is part of a continuum and connected to other consciousnesses that exist or existed, then transpersonal experience no longer seems strange. The idea of a hologram world can also be found in biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Intermon College in Virginia, says consciousness shouldn't be thought of as a product of the brain. Rather, on the contrary, consciousness creates the brain, body and the entire surrounding reality. Such a revolution in views can affect both medicine and the healing process of the body. What is now called treatment may be nothing more than correctly made adjustments to a person’s hologram. Healing occurs through a change in consciousness. Everyone knows that mental images can cure a person, the experience of the otherworldly and revelations can also be explained by a holographic model of the world.

In his book Gifts of the Unknown, biologist Liall Watson describes an encounter with a female shaman from Indonesia. She performed a ritual dance, and the grove of trees disappeared before the eyes of observers. Trees disappeared and reappeared. Such phenomena modern science can't explain.

In the hologram world there are no frames, no restrictions for changing reality. It becomes possible to bend a spoon and the scenes that Carlos Castaneda described in his books. The world is nothing more than a description of reality.

Whether the idea of a holographic world will develop or not is still unknown, but it has already become quite popular among scientists. If it is determined that the holographic model of the world does not explain instantaneous interaction well enough elementary particles, then, as Basil Healy, a physicist at Birbeck College, said, one must be prepared for the fact that reality may have to be understood differently.

Is our world a hologram?

Scientists from the Center for Astrophysical Research at Fermilab are today working on creating a device called the Holometer, with which they can disprove everything that humanity currently knows about the Universe.

OUR WORLD-PROJECTION

With the help of the Holometer device, experts hope to prove or disprove the crazy assumption that the three-dimensional Universe as we know it simply does not exist, being nothing more than a kind of hologram. In other words, the surrounding reality is an illusion and nothing more.

The theory that the Universe is a hologram is based on the recent assumption that space and time in the Universe are not continuous. They supposedly consist of separate parts, dots - as if from pixels, which is why it is impossible to increase the “image scale” of the Universe indefinitely, penetrating deeper and deeper into the essence of things. Upon reaching a certain scale value, the Universe turns out to be something like a digital image of very poor quality - fuzzy, blurry. Imagine an ordinary photograph from a magazine. It looks like a continuous image, but, starting from a certain level of magnification, it breaks up into dots that make up a single whole. And also our world is supposedly assembled from microscopic points into a single beautiful, even convex picture.

Amazing theory! And until recently, it was not taken seriously. Only latest research black holes have convinced most researchers that there is something to the "holographic" theory. The fact is that the gradual evaporation of black holes discovered by astronomers over time led to an information paradox - all the information contained about the insides of the hole would disappear in this case. And this contradicts the principle of storing information. But the laureate Nobel Prize in physics Gerard t'Hooft, relying on the works of Jerusalem University professor Jacob Bekenstein, proved that all the information contained in a three-dimensional object can be stored in the two-dimensional boundaries remaining after its destruction - just as an image of a three-dimensional object can be placed in two-dimensional hologram.

A SCIENTIST ONCE HAD A PHANTASM

For the first time, the “crazy” idea of universal illusoryness was born by University of London physicist David Bohm, a colleague of Albert Einstein, in the middle of the 20th century. According to his theory, the whole world is structured approximately the same as a hologram. Just as any no matter how small section of a hologram contains the entire image of a three-dimensional object, so every existing object is “embedded” in each of its component parts.

- From this it follows that objective reality does not exist, Professor Bohm made a stunning conclusion then. - Even despite its obvious density, the Universe is at its core a phantasm, a gigantic, luxuriously detailed hologram.

Let us remind you that a hologram is a three-dimensional photograph taken with a laser. To make it, first of all, the object being photographed must be illuminated with laser light. Then the second laser beam, combining with the reflected light from the object, gives an interference pattern (alternating minima and maxima of the beams), which can be recorded on film. The finished photo looks like a meaningless layering of light and dark lines. But as soon as you illuminate the image with another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object immediately appears.

Three-dimensionality is not the only remarkable property inherent in a hologram. If a hologram of, say, a tree is cut in half and illuminated with a laser, each half will contain a whole image of the same tree at exactly the same size. If we continue to cut the hologram into smaller pieces, on each of them we will again find an 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 proportionally corresponding decrease in clarity.

- The principle of the hologram “everything in every part” allows us to approach the issue of organization and orderliness in a completely new way, explained Professor Bohm. - For most of its history, Western science has developed 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 component parts. The hologram showed us that some things in the universe cannot be explored in this way. If we dissect something arranged holographically, we will not get the parts of which it consists, but we will get the same thing, but with less accuracy.

AND HERE APPEARED AN ASPECT THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING

Bohm’s “crazy” idea was also prompted by a sensational experiment with elementary particles in his time. University of Paris physicist Alan Aspect discovered in 1982 that certain conditions electrons are able to instantly communicate with each other regardless of the distance between them. It doesn't matter if there are ten millimeters between them or ten billion kilometers. Somehow each particle always knows what the other is doing. There was only one problem with this discovery: it violates Einstein's postulate about top speed 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 frightening prospect has caused physicists to strongly doubt the Aspect's work.

But Bohm managed to find an explanation. According to him, elementary particles interact at any distance not because they exchange some mysterious signals with each other, 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.

“For better understanding, the professor illustrated his intricate theory with the following example,” wrote the author of the book “The Holographic Universe” Michael Talbot. - Imagine an aquarium with fish. Imagine also that you cannot see the aquarium directly, but can only observe two television screens that transmit images from cameras, one located in front and the other on the side of the aquarium. Looking at the screens, you can conclude that the fish on each of the screens are separate objects. Because cameras capture images from different angles, the fish look different. But, as you continue to observe, after a while you will discover 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 from the front, another is certainly in profile. If you don't own the full picture situations, you are more likely to conclude that the fish must somehow instantly communicate with each other, that this is not a fact of random coincidence.”

- The obvious superluminal interaction between particles tells us that there is a deeper level of reality hidden from us, Bohm explained the phenomenon of the Aspect experiments, of a higher dimension than ours, as in the analogy with the aquarium. We see these particles as separate only because we see only part of reality. And the particles are not separate “parts,” but facets of a deeper unity that is ultimately as holographic and invisible as the tree mentioned above. And since everything in physical reality consists of these “phantoms,” the Universe we observe is itself a projection, a hologram.

What else the hologram may contain is not yet known. Suppose, for example, that it is the matrix that gives rise to everything in the world; at a minimum, it contains all the elementary particles that have taken or will once take every possible form of matter and energy - from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It's like a universal supermarket that has everything.

Although Bohm admitted that we have no way of knowing what else the hologram contains, he took it upon himself to assert that we have no reason to assume that there is nothing more in it. In other words, perhaps the holographic level of the world is simply one of the stages of endless evolution.

TIME IS MADE OF GRANULES

But is it possible to “feel” this illusory nature with instruments? It turned out yes. For several years now, research has been underway in Germany using the GEO600 gravitational telescope built in Hannover (Germany) to detect gravitational waves, oscillations in space-time that create supermassive space objects. However, not a single wave could be found over the years. One of the reasons is strange noises in the range from 300 to 1500 Hz, which the detector records for a long time. They really interfere with his work. Researchers searched in vain for the source of the noise until they were accidentally contacted by the director of the Center for Astrophysical Research at Fermilab, Craig Hogan. He stated that he understood what was going on. According to him, it follows from the holographic principle that space-time is not a continuous line and, most likely, is a collection of microzones, grains, a kind of space-time quanta.

- And the accuracy of the GEO600 equipment today is sufficient to detect vacuum fluctuations occurring at the boundaries of the quanta of space, the very grains of which, if the holographic principle is correct, the Universe consists, Professor Hogan explained.

According to him, GEO600 just stumbled upon a fundamental limitation of space-time - that very “grain”, like the grain of a magazine photograph. And he perceived this obstacle as “noise.”

And Craig Hogan, following Bohm, repeats with conviction:

- If the GEO600 results correspond to my expectations, then we all really live in a huge hologram of universal proportions.

The detector's readings so far match his calculations exactly, and it seems scientific world is on the verge of a grand opening. Experts remind that once extraneous noises that infuriated researchers at Bell Laboratory - a large research center in the field of telecommunications, electronic and computer systems - during experiments in 1964, have already become a harbinger of a global change in the scientific paradigm: this was discovered cosmic microwave background radiation, which proved the hypothesis about Big Bang.

And scientists are waiting for proof of the holographic nature of the Universe when the Holometer device starts working at full power. Scientists hope that it will increase the amount of practical data and knowledge of this extraordinary discovery, which still belongs to the field of theoretical physics. The detector is designed like this: they shine a laser through a beam splitter, from there two beams pass through two perpendicular bodies, are reflected, come back, merge together and create an interference pattern, where any distortion indicates a change in the ratio of the lengths of the bodies, since gravitational wave passes through bodies and compresses or stretches space unequally in different directions.

- The “holometer” will allow us to increase the scale of space-time and see whether assumptions about the fractional structure of the Universe, based purely on mathematical conclusions, are confirmed, Professor Hogan suggests.

The first data obtained using the new device will begin to arrive in the middle of this year.

AN OPTIMIST'S OPINION

Psychologist Jack Kornfield, speaking about his first meeting with the late Tibetan Buddhist teacher Kalu Rinpoche, recalls that the following dialogue took place between them:

- Could you tell me in a few sentences the very essence of Buddhist teachings?

- I could do it, but you won't believe me, and it will take you many years to understand what I'm talking about.

- Anyway, please explain, I really want to know. Rinpoche's answer was very short:

- You don't really exist.

OPINION OF A PESSIMIST

President of the Royal Society of London, cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees: “The birth of the Universe will forever remain a mystery to us”

- We cannot understand the laws of the universe. And you will never know how the Universe came into being and what awaits it. Hypotheses about the Big Bang, which allegedly gave birth to the world around us, or that many others can exist in parallel with our Universe, or about the holographic nature of the world - will remain unproven assumptions. Undoubtedly, there are explanations for everything, but there are no geniuses who could understand them. The human mind is limited. And he reached his limit. Even today, we are as far from understanding, for example, the microstructure of vacuum, as we are from fish in an aquarium, which have absolutely no idea how the environment in which they live works. For example, I have reason to suspect that space has a cellular structure. And each of its cells is trillions of trillions of times smaller than an atom. But we cannot prove or disprove this, or understand how such a design works. The task is too complex, beyond the reach of the human mind.

Is (or once was) a gigantic and very complex hologram in which all physical laws require only two dimensions, but at the same time everything around us operates according to three dimensions. As you can imagine, such a hypothesis is not at all easy to prove, but physicists report that they have finally found the first observable evidence that the early Universe could perfectly correspond to the so-called holographic principle and this does not contradict the standard Big Bang model.

“We propose to use this holographic model of the Universe, which is very different from the most popular standard model of the Big Bang, which relies on gravity and inflation,” says study co-author Nyaesh Afshordi from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

“Each of these models allows us to make different predictions that we can test, and based on this, refine and expand our theoretical understanding of the Universe. Moreover, this can be done within the next five years.”

To be clear, scientists are not saying that we are all living in a hologram right now. They merely suggest that early on—within a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang—everything in the Universe came to be a three-dimensional projection, originally created from two-dimensional boundaries.

If you are not at all familiar with the theoretical epic “Our Universe is a Hologram,” then here is a short excursion into history. The theory that our entire Universe is a hologram dates back to the 1990s, when American theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind began promoting to the masses his idea that the laws of physics as we know them do not actually require three dimensions.

So how is it that the Universe around us is three-dimensional, but “in reality” it is represented as two-dimensional? The basis of the idea is that the volume of its space is “encoded” within certain boundaries, or in the so-called field of the gravitational horizon, whose boundaries depend on the point of observation. Before you start laughing, consider that since 1997, more than 10,000 papers have been written supporting this idea. In other words, she is not as crazy as she might seem at first glance. Well, if only a little.

Now, Afshordi and his team have reported that, as part of their study of the uneven distribution of cosmic microwave background radiation (residual radiation from the Big Bang), they have found strong evidence that supports an explanation of the holographic shape of the Universe in its earliest stages of development.

“Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and taking into account your perception of time) actually comes from a two-dimensional flat field,” says Kostas Skenderis from the University of Southampton and one of the study participants.

“The principle is similar to what we can find in conventional holograms, where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional plane. This, for example, is typical for holograms on credit cards. However, in our case we are talking about the fact that the entire Universe is encoded in this way.”

The reason why physicists are interested in the holographic principle at all, while the standard Big Bang model seems much clearer and more logical, is that there are some gaps in the latter, but these gaps are so fundamental that they slow down the process of our understanding of all physical laws in general and still in its infancy.

According to the Big Bang scenario, chemical reactions led to a very large-scale expansion of the original space, which led to the formation of our Universe. And at the early stage of its birth, the speed of this expansion (inflation) was colossal. While most physicists support the theory of cosmic inflation, no one has yet been able to figure out the exact mechanism responsible for this sudden expansion of the Universe at speeds faster than the speed of light and growth from the subatomic level to the present. Everything happened almost instantly.

The trouble is that none of our current theories can explain how it all works together. Take, for example, general theory relativity, which perfectly explains the behavior of large objects, but is unable to explain the behavior of the smallest ones. It's already Wednesday quantum mechanics, which, in turn, is not able to explain many other things. All of this is even more depressing when it comes to explaining how literally all the mass and energy in the universe was originally concentrated in a tiny space. One hypothesis tries to combine both phenomena at once, the other, about quantum gravity, says that if you can discard one spatial dimension, then you can discard gravity in your calculations to simplify the problem of calculations.

Holographic principle

“It’s all a hologram. In the sense that there is a description of the Universe that says that the probability of even a reduced number of dimensions corresponds to everything that we can see after the Big Bang,” says Afshordi.

To test how well the holographic principle of the Universe copes with explaining everything that happened at the very moment of the Big Bang and after this event, a team of scientists created a computer model with one time and two spatial dimensions.

When the researchers fed the model with what we know about the universe, including observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation—thermal radiation emitted just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang—they found no inconsistencies. Everything fit perfectly. Including relict radiation. The model actually did an excellent job of recreating the behavior of thin slices of the CMB, but was unable to recreate larger “slices” of the Universe wider than 10 degrees. This will require a more complex model.

Scientists explain that they are very far from proving that our universe was actually once a holographic projection. However, we now have the fact of obtaining empirical data collected on the basis of real knowledge about the Universe. This fact may ultimately be the beginning of a possibility that will explain the missing parts in physical laws from a two-dimensional perspective. In other words, the work of Afshordi and his colleagues only proves that recklessly abandoning the possibility of a holographic model of the Universe is a completely unforgivable luxury.

Does this mean that we are all now living in a complex hologram? According to Afshordi, this is not entirely true. Their model is capable of describing what happened only in the most early era the Universe, but not its current state. However, it is now worth considering how things from two-dimensional space can be projected into three-dimensional space, if, of course, we are talking about the Universe and not about credit cards.

“I would say that we are not living in a hologram. But we shouldn’t discount the possibility that we could get out of it. However, in 2017 you are definitely living in three dimensions,” Afshordi concluded.

The nature of the hologram - “the whole in every particle” - gives us a completely new way of understanding the structure and order of things. We see objects, such as elementary particles, as separated because we see only part of reality. These particles are not separate “parts,” but facets of a deeper unity.

At some deeper level of reality, such particles are not separate objects, but, as it were, a continuation of something more fundamental.

Scientists have come to the conclusion that elementary particles are able to interact with each other regardless of distance, not because they exchange some mysterious signals, but because their separation is an illusion.

If particle separation is an illusion, then on a deeper level, all things in the world are infinitely interconnected. The electrons in the carbon atoms in our brain are connected to the electrons in every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shines in the sky. The universe as a hologram means that we do not exist.

...The theory that the Universe is a hologram is based on the recently emerged assumption that space and time in the Universe are not continuous.

They supposedly consist of separate parts, dots - as if from pixels, which is why it is impossible to increase the “image scale” of the Universe indefinitely, penetrating deeper and deeper into the essence of things. Upon reaching a certain scale value, the Universe turns out to be something like a digital image of very poor quality - fuzzy, blurry.

Imagine an ordinary photograph from a magazine. It looks like a continuous image, but, starting from a certain level of magnification, it breaks up into dots that make up a single whole. And also our world is supposedly assembled from microscopic points into a single beautiful, even convex picture.

Amazing theory! And until recently, it was not taken seriously. Only recent studies of black holes have convinced most researchers that there is something to the “holographic” theory.

The fact is that the gradual evaporation of black holes discovered by astronomers over time led to an information paradox - all the information contained about the insides of the hole would disappear in this case.

And this contradicts the principle of storing information.

But Nobel Prize laureate in physics Gerard t'Hooft, relying on the work of Jerusalem University professor Jacob Bekenstein, proved that all the information contained in a three-dimensional object can be preserved in the two-dimensional boundaries remaining after its destruction - just like an image of a three-dimensional object can be placed in a two-dimensional hologram.

A scientist once had a phantasm

For the first time, the “crazy” idea of universal illusoryness was born by University of London physicist David Bohm, a colleague of Albert Einstein, in the middle of the 20th century.

According to his theory, the whole world is structured approximately the same as a hologram.

Just as any no matter how small section of a hologram contains the entire image of a three-dimensional object, so every existing object is “embedded” in each of its component parts.

From this it follows that objective reality does not exist, Professor Bohm made a stunning conclusion then. - Even despite its obvious density, the Universe is at its core a phantasm, a gigantic, luxuriously detailed hologram.

The finished photo looks like a meaningless layering of light and dark lines. But as soon as you illuminate the image with another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object immediately appears.

Three-dimensionality is not the only remarkable property inherent in a hologram.

If a hologram of, say, a tree is cut in half and illuminated with a laser, each half will contain a whole image of the same tree at exactly the same size. If we continue to cut the hologram into smaller pieces, on each of them we will again find an 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 proportionally corresponding decrease in clarity.

The principle of the hologram “everything in every part” allows us to approach the issue of organization and orderliness in a completely new way, explained Professor Bohm. - For most of its history, Western science has developed 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 component parts.

The hologram showed us that some things in the universe cannot be explored in this way. If we dissect something arranged holographically, we will not get the parts of which it consists, but we will get the same thing, but with less accuracy.

And then an explanatory aspect appeared

Bohm’s “crazy” idea was also prompted by a sensational experiment with elementary particles in his time. A physicist at the University of Paris, Alain Aspect, discovered in 1982 that, under certain conditions, electrons can instantly communicate with each other, regardless of the distance between them.

It doesn't matter if there are ten millimeters between them or ten billion kilometers. Somehow each particle always knows what the other is doing. There was only one problem with this discovery: it violates Einstein’s postulate about the limiting speed of interaction propagation, equal to the speed of light.

Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this frightening prospect has caused physicists to strongly doubt the Aspect's work.

Looking at the screens, you can conclude that the fish on each of the screens are separate objects. Because cameras capture images from different angles, the fish look different. But, as you continue to observe, after a while you will discover 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 from the front, another is certainly in profile. If you don’t have a complete picture of the situation, you are more likely to conclude that the fish must somehow instantly communicate with each other, that this is not a fact of random coincidence.”

The obvious superluminal interaction between particles tells us that there is a deeper level of reality hidden from us, Bohm explained the phenomenon of Aspect’s experiments, of a higher dimension than ours, as in the analogy with the aquarium. We see these particles as separate only because we see only part of reality.

And the particles are not separate “parts,” but facets of a deeper unity that is ultimately as holographic and invisible as the tree mentioned above.

And since everything in physical reality consists of these “phantoms,” the Universe we observe is itself a projection, a hologram.

What else the hologram may contain is not yet known.

Suppose, for example, that it is the matrix that gives rise to everything in the world; at a minimum, it contains all the elementary particles that have taken or will once take every possible form of matter and energy - from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It's like a universal supermarket that has everything.

Optimist's opinion

Psychologist Jack Kornfield, speaking about his first meeting with the late Tibetan Buddhist teacher Kalu Rinpoche, recalls that the following dialogue took place between them:

Could you tell me in a few sentences the very essence of Buddhist teachings?

I could do it, but you won't believe me, and it will take you many years to understand what I'm talking about.

Anyway, please explain, I really want to know. Rinpoche's answer was very short:

You don't really exist.

Time is made of granules

However, not a single wave could be found over the years. One of the reasons is strange noises in the range from 300 to 1500 Hz, which the detector records for a long time. They really interfere with his work.

Researchers searched in vain for the source of the noise until they were accidentally contacted by the director of the Center for Astrophysical Research at Fermilab, Craig Hogan.

He stated that he understood what was going on. According to him, it follows from the holographic principle that space-time is not a continuous line and, most likely, is a collection of microzones, grains, a kind of space-time quanta.

And the accuracy of the GEO600 equipment today is sufficient to detect vacuum fluctuations occurring at the boundaries of the quanta of space, the very grains of which, if the holographic principle is correct, the Universe consists, Professor Hogan explained.

According to him, GEO600 just stumbled upon a fundamental limitation of space-time - that very “grain”, like the grain of a magazine photograph. And he perceived this obstacle as “noise.”

And Craig Hogan, following Bohm, repeats with conviction:

If the GEO600 results correspond to my expectations, then we all really live in a huge hologram of universal proportions.

The detector's readings so far exactly match his calculations, and it seems that the scientific world is on the verge of a grand discovery.

Experts remind that once extraneous noises that infuriated researchers at Bell Laboratory - a large research center in the field of telecommunications, electronic and computer systems - during experiments in 1964, have already become a harbinger of a global change in the scientific paradigm: this is how cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered, which proved the hypothesis about the Big Bang.

The detector is designed like this: they shine a laser through a beam splitter, from there two beams pass through two perpendicular bodies, are reflected, come back, merge together and create an interference pattern, where any distortion reports a change in the ratio of the lengths of the bodies, since the gravitational wave passes through the bodies and compresses or stretches space unequally in different directions.

“The Holometer will allow us to increase the scale of space-time and see whether assumptions about the fractional structure of the Universe, based purely on mathematical conclusions, are confirmed,” Professor Hogan suggests.

The first data obtained using the new device will begin to arrive in the middle of this year.

Pessimist's opinion

President of the Royal Society of London, cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees: “The birth of the Universe will forever remain a mystery to us”

We cannot understand the laws of the universe. And you will never know how the Universe came into being and what awaits it. Hypotheses about the Big Bang, which allegedly gave birth to the world around us, or that many others can exist in parallel with our Universe, or about the holographic nature of the world - will remain unproven assumptions.

Undoubtedly, there are explanations for everything, but there are no geniuses who could understand them. The human mind is limited. And he reached his limit. Even today, we are as far from understanding, for example, the microstructure of vacuum, as we are from fish in an aquarium, which have absolutely no idea how the environment in which they live works.

For example, I have reason to suspect that space has a cellular structure. And each of its cells is trillions of trillions of times smaller than an atom. But we cannot prove or disprove this, or understand how such a design works. The task is too complex, beyond the reach of the human mind - “Russian space”.

After nine months of calculations on a powerful supercomputer, astrophysicists managed to create a computer model of a beautiful spiral galaxy, which is a copy of our Milky Way.

At the same time, the physics of formation and evolution of our galaxy is observed. This model, which was created by researchers from the University of California and the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Zurich, allows us to solve a problem facing science that arose from the prevailing cosmological model of the Universe.

“Previous attempts to create a massive disk galaxy like the Milky Way failed because the model had a bulge (central bulge) that was too large compared to the size of the disk,” said Javiera Guedes, an astronomy and astrophysics graduate student at the University of California and author. scientific article about this model, called Eris. The study will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Eris is a massive spiral galaxy with a core at the center, which consists of bright stars and other structural objects characteristic of such galaxies as Milky Way. In terms of parameters such as brightness, the ratio of the width of the center of the galaxy to the width of the disk, stellar composition and other properties, it coincides with the Milky Way and other galaxies of this type.

According to co-author Piero Madau, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California, considerable funds were spent on the implementation of the project, which went towards the purchase of 1.4 million processor-hours of calculation time on a supercomputer on NASA's Pleiades computer.

The results obtained made it possible to confirm the theory of “cold dark matter", according to which, the evolution of the structure of the Universe proceeded under the influence gravitational interactions dark cold matter (“dark” because it cannot be seen, and “cold” because the particles move very slowly).

“This model tracks the interactions of more than 60 million dark matter particles and gas. Its code includes the physics of gravity and fluid dynamics, star formation and supernova explosions - all at the highest resolution of any cosmological model in the world,” Guedes said.

Editor's note: Here is an article about Michael Talbot's theory, which he revealed in his book "The Holographic Universe" (1991). Despite the fact that the article was written at the turn of the century, the thoughts expressed in it are relevant for researchers today.

Michael Talbot (1953-1992), a native of Australia, was the author of numerous books highlighting the parallels between ancient mysticism and quantum mechanics and supporting a theoretical model of reality that physical universe like a giant hologram.

Does objective reality exist, or is the Universe a phantasm?

In 1982, a remarkable event occurred. At the University of Paris, a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect conducted an experiment that may turn out to be one of the most significant in the 20th century. You didn't hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals, chances are you haven't even heard of the name Alain Aspect, although some scientists believe his discovery could change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain conditions, elementary particles such as electrons can communicate with each other instantly, regardless of the distance between them. It doesn't matter if there are 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 limiting speed of interaction being equal to the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this frightening prospect has led some physicists to try to explain Aspect's experiments in complex workarounds. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

For example, London University physicist David Bohm believed that from the discovery of Aspect it follows that objective reality does not exist, that, despite its obvious density, the universe is fundamentally a phantasm, a gigantic, luxuriously detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm made such a startling conclusion, we need to talk about holograms.

A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph taken using a laser. To make a hologram, the object being photographed must first be illuminated with laser light. Then the second laser beam, combining with the reflected light from the object, gives an interference pattern that can be recorded on film. The finished photo looks like a meaningless alternation of light and dark lines. But as soon as you illuminate the image with another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object immediately appears.

Three-dimensionality is not the only remarkable property inherent in a hologram. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and illuminated with a laser, each half will contain a whole image of the same rose at exactly the same size. If we continue to cut the hologram into smaller pieces, on each of them we will again find an 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 proportionally corresponding decrease 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 much of its history, Western science has developed 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 component parts. The hologram showed us that some things in the universe cannot be explored in this way. If we dissect something arranged holographically, we will not get the parts of which it consists, but we will get the same thing, but with less accuracy.

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 with each other, 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 better understand this, Bohm offered the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium with fish. Imagine also that you cannot see the aquarium directly, but can only observe two television screens that transmit images from cameras, one located in front and the other on the side of the aquarium. Looking at the screens, you can conclude that the fish on each of the screens are separate objects. Because cameras capture images from different angles, the fish look different. But, as you continue to observe, after a while you will discover 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 from the front, another is certainly in profile. Unless you 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 this is a random 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, higher dimensional than ours, as in the fishbowl analogy. And, he adds, we see 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 on a deeper level all objects in the world may be infinitely interconnected. The electrons in the carbon atoms in our brain are linked to the electrons in every swimming salmon, every beating heart, every twinkling star. Everything interpenetrates with everything, and although it is human nature to separate, dismember, and put all natural phenomena on shelves, all divisions are necessarily artificial, and nature ultimately appears as an unbroken web. In the holographic world, even time and space cannot be taken as a basis. Because a characteristic like position has no meaning 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. At this deeper level, reality is something like a super-hologram in which the past, present and future exist simultaneously. This means that, with the help of appropriate tools, it may be possible to penetrate deep into this super-hologram and extract pictures of a long-forgotten past.

What more may be carried by a hologram - it is still far from known. Suppose, for example, that a hologram is a matrix that gives rise to everything in the world, at a minimum it contains all the elementary particles that have taken or will someday take every possible form of matter and energy, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It's like a universal supermarket that has everything.

Although Bohm admitted that we have no way of knowing what else is in the hologram, he took it upon himself to say that we have no reason to assume that there is nothing more in it. In other words, perhaps the holographic level of the world is simply one of the stages of endless evolution.

Bohm is not alone in his desire to explore the properties of the holographic world. Regardless, Stanford University neuroscientist Karl Pribram, who works in the field of brain research, also leans toward a holographic picture of the world. Pribram came to this conclusion by pondering the mystery of where and how memories are stored in the brain. Numerous experiments over the decades have shown that information is not stored in any specific part of the brain, but is dispersed throughout the brain. In a series of pivotal experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley discovered that no matter what part of a rat's brain he removed, he could not achieve extinction. conditioned reflexes, produced in the rat before surgery. The only problem was that no one had been able to come up with a mechanism to explain this curious "all in every part" property of memory.

Later, in the 60s, Pribram encountered the principle of holography and realized that he had found the explanation that neuroscientists were looking for. Pribram is confident that memory is contained not in neurons or groups of neurons, but in a series of nerve impulses that “weave” the brain, just as a laser beam “weaves” 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 space. It is estimated that the human brain is capable of remembering about 10 billion bits over a lifetime (which corresponds to approximately the amount of information contained in 5 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica).

It was discovered that another striking feature was added to the properties of holograms - enormous recording density. By simply changing the angle at which the lasers illuminate photographic 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 uncanny ability to quickly retrieve the information we need from our enormous memory capacity becomes more understandable if we accept that the brain works on the principle of a hologram. If a friend asks you what came to mind when you heard the word zebra, you won't have to mechanically search 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 instantly and mutually correlated with every other - another quality inherent in the hologram. Since any part of the hologram is infinitely interconnected with any other, it is quite possible that it is nature's highest example of cross-correlated systems.

The location of memory is not the only neurophysiological mystery that has become more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic brain model. The other is how the brain is able to translate such an avalanche of frequencies that it perceives through various senses (frequencies of light, sound frequencies, and so on) into our concrete understanding of the world. Encoding and decoding frequencies is what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram serves as a kind of lens, a transmitting device capable of turning an apparently 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 inner world our perceptions.

Many facts indicate that the brain uses the principle of holography to function. Pribram's theory is finding more and more supporters among neuroscientists.

Argentine-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model to the realm of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that people can determine the direction of a sound source without turning their head, even with only one ear working, Zucarelli discovered that the principles of holography could explain this ability.

He also developed holophonic sound recording technology, capable of reproducing soundscapes with almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's idea that our brains mathematically construct "solid" reality based on input frequencies has also received brilliant experimental confirmation. It has been discovered that any of our senses has a much larger frequency range of susceptibility than previously thought. For example, researchers have discovered that our senses 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 the cells in our body are sensitive to a wide range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that this is the work of the holographic part of our consciousness, which converts separate chaotic frequencies into continuous perception.

But the most stunning aspect of Pribram's holographic brain model comes to light when it is compared with Bohm's theory. Because if the visible 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 converts them into sensory ones perception, what remains to the share of objective reality?

Let's put it simply - it ceases to exist. As Eastern religions have asserted from time immemorial, material world there is Maya, 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 a hologram.

This startling new picture of reality, a synthesis of the views of Bohm and Pribram, is called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have received it with skepticism, others have been encouraged by it. A small but growing group of researchers believe it is one of the most accurate models of the world yet proposed. Moreover, some hope that it will help solve some mysteries that have not previously been explained by science and even considered paranormal activity as part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, conclude that many parapsychological phenomena become more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which the individual brain is virtually an indivisible part, a "quantum" of the larger hologram, and everything is infinitely connected to everything else, telepathy may simply be an achievement of the holographic level. It becomes much easier to understand how information can be delivered from consciousness “A” to consciousness “B” over any distance, and to explain many mysteries of psychology. In particular, Grof foresees that the holographic paradigm could offer a model to explain many of the puzzling phenomena observed by people in altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while researching LSD as a psychotherapeutic drug, 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 a creature possessing such forms, but also noted the 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, which plays an important role in mating games, was confirmed, although the woman had previously had no idea about such subtleties.

This woman's experience was not unique. During his research, Grof encountered patients returning along the ladder of evolution and identifying themselves with the most different types(the scene of the transformation of a man into a monkey in the film “Altered States” is based on them). Moreover, he found that such descriptions often contained little-known zoological details that, when tested, turned out to be accurate.

Return to animals is not the only phenomenon described by Grof. He also had patients who seemed to be able to tap into some kind of area of the collective or racial unconscious. Uneducated or poorly educated people suddenly gave detailed descriptions of funerals in Zoroastrian practice or scenes Hindu mythology. In other experiments, people gave convincing descriptions of out-of-body travel, predictions of pictures of the future, events of past incarnations.

In later studies, Grof found that the same range of phenomena occurred in drug-free therapy sessions. Since the common element of such experiments was the expansion of individual consciousness beyond the usual boundaries 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 appeared, called “transpersonal” psychology, entirely devoted to this areas.

Although the Association of Transpersonal Psychology created by Grof represented 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 many years to explain the strange psychological phenomena that they observed. But this ambiguous situation has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if consciousness is in fact part of a continuum, a labyrinth connected not only to every other consciousness that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism and vast region of space and time, its ability to randomly form tunnels 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, showed 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 revolution in our understanding of biological structures has 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 observing as a mysterious cure could in fact have occurred due to a change in consciousness, which made appropriate adjustments to the body hologram.

Likewise, new alternative therapies, such as visualization, can work so well precisely because in the holographic reality, thought is ultimately as real as “reality.”

Even revelations and experiences of the “otherworldly” become explainable from the point of view of the new paradigm. Biologist Lyall Watson in his book “Gifts of the Unknown” describes a meeting with an Indonesian woman shaman who, while performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly disappear into the subtle world. Watson writes that as he and another surprised witness continued to watch her, she made the trees disappear and reappear 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 true, then overall this is the most significant implication of the holographic paradigm, since it means that the phenomena observed by Watson are not publicly available simply because our minds are not programmed to trust them, which would 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 paint whatever picture we want. 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 suspect, since in a holographic reality, as Pribram showed, even random events must be considered using holographic principles and resolved that way. Synchronicities or random coincidences suddenly make sense, and anything can be seen as a metaphor, since even a chain random events may express some kind of deep symmetry.

Whether the holographic paradigm of Bohm and Pribram receives general scientific recognition or fades into oblivion, we can confidently say that it has already influenced the way of thinking of many scientists. And even if the holographic model is found to be an unsatisfactory description of the instantaneous interactions of elementary particles, at least, as Birbeck College London physicist Basil Hiley points out, Aspect's discovery "showed that we must be willing to consider radically new approaches to understanding reality."

I heard about this discovery from one smart person around 1994, albeit with a slightly different interpretation. The experience was described something like this. The flow of elementary particles traveled a certain path and hit the target. In the middle of this path, some characteristics of the particles were measured, apparently those whose measurement does not have a significant effect on their future fate. As a result, it was found that the results of these measurements depend on what events happen to 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 think seriously about the validity of the postulates of the theory of relativity in relation to particles, and also remember about Nostradamus...

Translation: Irina Mirzuitova, 1999