UNIVERSE SCIENCE & GOD
Chapter- 4: Holographic Universe
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 Alain Aspect’s findings. It has also inspired others to offer even
more radical explanations including that of the holographic universe! The implications of a holographic universe
are truly mind boggling… 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 a
number of physicists including David Bohm made this startling assertion, one
must first understand a little about holograms.
Hologram:
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 superimpose -- 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 is still found to contain the entire image of
the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film is
always 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 laboured
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 some thing constructed holographically, we
will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.
Extensions of the Same Source: This insight suggested to some scientists
including David Bohm another way of understanding Aspect’s discovery. Bohm
believed 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. Bohm
suggested that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not
individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental
something!
Beyond Cause and Effect:
Quantum Entanglement seems to throw out the whole notion of cause and
effect, as we know it! It is possible for a particle to interact with another
particle in such a way that the quantum states of the two particles form a
single entangled state. The definition of an entangled state is that it is not
entirely independent of the other's state. Its state is dependent on another's
state in some way. Given this dependency, it is a mistake to consider either
state in isolation from the other. Rather we should combine the states and
treat the result as a single, entangled state.
Space and Time:
When pairs of particles are generated by the decay of other particles,
naturally or through induced collision such as at CERN or Fermi Labs, these
pairs may be termed "entangled", in that such pairs often necessarily
have linked and opposite qualities, ie of spin or charge. The assumption that
measurement in effect "creates" the state of the measured quality
goes back to the arguments of, among others: Schrödinger and Einstein, Podolsky
and Rosen concerning Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and its relation to
observation. Quantum Entanglement does underline the fact that quantum
particles really do only have a range of probabilities on the values of their
properties rather than fixed values. And while it seems to contradict
Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which says nothing can travel faster
than light, it’s increasingly likely that entanglement challenges our ideas of
what space and time really mean!
Next: >>>> Chapter-5: Attributes of God & Science