Holographic Universe Theory - woo or not?

[MikeSun5]

I saw an article posted in a thread recently that blew my mind. It is a theory that our universe is merely a hologram - that the concreteness we percieve isn't real, and everything is made up of different light frequencies.

The theory is accepted by some scientists, while other scientists remain skeptical. I'm no scientist, but so far I'm leaning towards siding with the latter. While the theory seems plausible on a subatomic level, I find it hard to believe that my brain is an illusion.

According to this article (which goes more in-depth), this hologram universe theory could potentially explain quantum superposition of particles, human consciousness, past life and out-of-body experiences, predicting the future, and telepathy. Really?? Yes, really.

Normally, I'm happy to hear a new theory emerge from the great minds that study quantum physics, and I do like to indulge in abstract thought experiments...

Unfortunately, quantum physics today is under constant assault from the religious and New Age believers who wish to cherry pick from valid scientific research to support their pseudoscientific and paranormal claims. Deepak Chopra, his peers, and their legions of oblivious minions are quick to feed off any morsel of science that sounds like it fits in with their crazy nonsense.

Case and point: this is an article from Crystalinks, a popular woo-promoting encyclopedia of sorts. The article on Holographic Universe theory is shown there pretty much verbatim - but of course it includes "facts" at the end which tie the theory in with Sacred Geometry.

So what say you, JREF? Is the Holographic Universe Theory more science than woo, or more woo than science? (because I'm sure we can most definitely agree it's going to be scientific woo-food...)

 

[theprestige]

I saw an article posted in a thread recently that blew my mind. It is a theory that our universe is merely a hologram - that the concreteness we percieve isn't real, and everything is made up of different light frequencies.

Which frequencies, I wonder?

I mean, I'm pretty sure we've accounted for the entire frequency range, and so far all the frequencies in it don't manifest any observable "concreteness".

I guess the theory should probably predict that a particular frequency or combination of frequencies makes up a particular kind of concreteness, and then reproduce the effect in a lab with that frequency or combination of frequencies.

If the predicted concreteness doesn't manifest, the theory fails.

If the theory doesn't even make such a prediction in the first place, it's worth less than a pair of Amazonian River Dolphin's Bollocks.*















*Which are a prized delicacy in some cultures, which makes them infinitely more valuable than a "theory" which doesn't make any testable predictions.

 

[DrKarlKid]

Which frequencies, I wonder?

I mean, I'm pretty sure we've accounted for the entire frequency range, and so far all the frequencies in it don't manifest any observable "concreteness".

I guess the theory should probably predict that a particular frequency or combination of frequencies makes up a particular kind of concreteness, and then reproduce the effect in a lab with that frequency or combination of frequencies.

If the predicted concreteness doesn't manifest, the theory fails.

If the theory doesn't even make such a prediction in the first place, it's worth less than a pair of Amazonian River Dolphin's Bollocks.*















*Which are a prized delicacy in some cultures, which makes them infinitely more valuable than a "theory" which doesn't make any testable predictions.

I agree dolphins bollocks so much more valuable at least to female dolphins. either way this holographic universe business finds me at a loose end not being a quantum physicist but light as a solid seems a bit far fetched

 

[MikeSun5]

Which frequencies, I wonder?

I mean, I'm pretty sure we've accounted for the entire frequency range, and so far all the frequencies in it don't manifest any observable "concreteness".

I guess the theory should probably predict that a particular frequency or combination of frequencies makes up a particular kind of concreteness, and then reproduce the effect in a lab with that frequency or combination of frequencies.

If the predicted concreteness doesn't manifest, the theory fails.

I forgot that most people like to ask stuff without reading the links. Here's where that came from:

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smellisin part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.
We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

My problem is this information is coming from scientists, when it sure sounds like it should be coming from New Agers.

 

[bit_pattern]

I was quite smitten by this a few years back (magic mushrooms will do that to a person) and although I'm nowhere near qualified to say whether it's woo I suspect it probably is. If you want to look further into then research David Bohm, he's the physicist that first proposed the idea and, as far as I know, it was pretty roundly condemned by his peers at the time.

 

[Ron Webb]

Definitely woo. Frankly there isn't enough substance to this idea even to criticize it properly. A hologram is a two-dimensional surface that looks like a three-dimensional object from the outside. But it isn't really three-dimensional, so there is no "inside" for us to inhabit. A hologram is just a projection, much like a projection in a movie theatre.

This hypothesis is a lot like saying maybe we're not real people, maybe we're just images on a screen in some alien movie theatre. IMHO it's impossible, even in fantasy, to imagine how that could work. I could (barely) imagine that our universe and all of us within it exist only as some gi-normous computer simulation on an alien supercomputer; and I could imagine that the supercomputer is projecting its results on some holographic or otherwise display. But the display is merely incidental, and has nothing to do with the operation of the simulation. Turn the display off and the simulation will continue to run.

Oh, and by the way, a hologram doesn't have "pixels".

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

There's nothing woo about the holographic universe, or more accurately the holographic principle^WP. It's a mathematically consistent principle related to the thermodynamics of a black hole, and possibly the universe as a whole.

What is woo is all the new-age nonsense that's sprouted up around it, sometimes by people who should know better. It has nothing to do with human consciousness, ESP, or whatever.

It also doesn't imply that the universe is somehow illusory. At best, it implies that dimensionality is illusory, but that's hardly a novel thing to accept--time as a true 4th dimension has been acceptable for a long time, and the possibility that space has 10, 11, or 26 dimensions is also well accepted. It shouldn't really surprise anyone that space could have fewer than 3 dimensions, at least in some abstract mathematical sense.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[Tricky]

This seems to be a popular topic among Mikes.

 

[theprestige]

I forgot that most people like to ask stuff without reading the links. Here's where that came from:

Right.

So: Which frequencies?

My problem is this information is coming from scientists, when it sure sounds like it should be coming from New Agers.

My problem is that the quoted passage goes on and on about "mathematically" this and "mathematically" that.

So: Where's the math?

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

Oh, and by the way, a hologram doesn't have "pixels".

Typical holograms are just photographs with a high enough resolution to record the interference patterns from the laser light that illuminates them. They have grains, at the least. And there's no reason why you couldn't scan a hologram into an image of pixels, and duplicate it at a high enough quality to be indistinguishable from the original.

Holograms have some surprising qualities, such as being able to move your head to see around objects, and for lenses (such as in a microscope) to work the way you would expect. If a hologram were produced with a high enough fidelity that you couldn't distinguish it from the original by any measurement, who's to say that the two are fundamentally different?

Of course a holographic universe wouldn't work by the same principle as normal ones. It would need to take the time dimension into account, for one. The point is just that if there's a strict mathematical equivalence, Ockham's razor leans us toward choosing the universe with fewer dimensions, no matter what our intuition.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

So: Where's the math?

The AdS/CFT correspondence^WP is a good start.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[Piggy]

An interesting and accessible article from Scientific American (November '05) -- The Illusion of Gravity: Holographic Physics Might Explain Nature's Most Baffling Force. Linky requires scrip to go beyond intro, but you can find back issues at your local library.

 

[Erigena]

I can understand the brain acting as a web with it's physical parts connected to create a whole. I can also understand how that function would explain memory storage, but I don't believe our reality is a hologram. I can accept that we do not have the capability to view everything in the universe exactly how it is because dark matter and black holes are an example of our limited ability.

Saying we don't exist physically would imply that we don't die either. If we don't exist physically than we can't physically suffer so why treat diseases with medications? Why develop vaccines? Who is going to tell the cancer patient that they don't really have cancer. That it's an illusion based on our perception of reality and if they could perceive not having it they would be cured. Oh wait, they already did perceive not having it, before they were diagnosed and depending on the cancer and the treatment they receive they could die from it regardless of whether or not they knew they had it.

I do not for a moment believe we exist as a state of consciousness or that this is the explanation for life, the universe and everything.

As far as the paranormal, most if not all "experiences" people claim to have can be explained using our current "perception" of reality. There may be some truth to a person's physical make up connected like the web example given in the text regarding the body and brain of an individual, but we definitely have different parts with different functions that serve different purposes even at the subatomic level IMHO.

Everybody knows the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42.

 

[MikeSun5]

So: Which frequencies?
...
So: Where's the math?

So you don't read the links and now you don't know how google works either? Lazy much?

Here's a wikipedia entry, and if you don't want to read, here's a video.

Holograms have some surprising qualities, such as being able to move your head to see around objects, and for lenses (such as in a microscope) to work the way you would expect. If a hologram were produced with a high enough fidelity that you couldn't distinguish it from the original by any measurement, who's to say that the two are fundamentally different?

Well, they wouldn't be different... Of course the fundamental difference between holograms and reality is tactile. Your hand passes right through a hologram, yet we're able to interact with solid objects.
To say that solids are holograms too would seem to imply that photons can be bunched up together dense enough to form physical matter....?? Or what the 2nd article from the OP suggested was that we only perceive things to be solids because our sense of touch is an illusion. Gack.

 

[Ron Webb]

There's nothing woo about the holographic universe, or more accurately the holographic principle^WP. It's a mathematically consistent principle related to the thermodynamics of a black hole, and possibly the universe as a whole.

Thanks for that Wikipedia link, which explains things a whole lot better than the original article. I'll need to take some time to read and absorb it.

 

[Complexity]

There's nothing woo about the holographic universe, or more accurately the holographic principle^WP. It's a mathematically consistent principle related to the thermodynamics of a black hole, and possibly the universe as a whole.

What is woo is all the new-age nonsense that's sprouted up around it, sometimes by people who should know better. It has nothing to do with human consciousness, ESP, or whatever.

It also doesn't imply that the universe is somehow illusory. At best, it implies that dimensionality is illusory, but that's hardly a novel thing to accept--time as a true 4th dimension has been acceptable for a long time, and the possibility that space has 10, 11, or 26 dimensions is also well accepted. It shouldn't really surprise anyone that space could have fewer than 3 dimensions, at least in some abstract mathematical sense.

- Dr. Trintignant

I concur. The holographic universe, or holographic principle, is extremely cool to the extent that I've been able to 'understand' it. It has nothing to do with minds or frequencies.

It also has nothing to do with the woo that some have attached to the same name.

 

[mike3]

First off, there is a real scientific theory about the universe involving "holographic" ideas. It says that the higher-dimensional universe is all "encoded" on the cosmological horizon, a 2-dimensional surface. This is a weird and interesting theory indeed -- it doesn't need any kooky crap to make it more interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

This idea originates with black holes, and the proposal is to generalize it to the whole (observable) universe. This appears to be what the first article you mention is referencing.

The second article looks more kooky. There are ill-defined or ill-conceived bits, such as "what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies" -- what does this mean: frequency of what, exactly? Anecdotes are used, e.g. "In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession." -- okay, who is this guy? Is he trustworthy? Has anyone else tried to V. that the mentioned phenomena exist, etc.? It also suggests the whole universe is a product of our own mind. If so, then why can't any/all of us just "will" anything/everything we please to happen? It seems that "objective" reality does exist, and we are bound by it, not the other way around. This article looks to be some wildly different and much more ill-defined concept than that in the real scientific theory that has parroted the name.

And the third is also kooky.

And...

According to this article (which goes more in-depth), this hologram universe theory could potentially explain quantum superposition of particles, human consciousness, past life and out-of-body experiences, predicting the future, and telepathy.

There's only two phenomena (superposition, consciousness) that are proven to exist there. The rest don't even have any evidence to prove they even exist -- so why does one need to try and explain them? They should first provide some evidence those phenomena exist before trying to "explain" them with this theory.

 

[Fredrik]

Just a few comments: The "holographic principle" is something entirely different than the Bohm-Pribram stuff. As far as I can tell, they have nothing in common. (I'm not willing to read enough of the Bohm-Pribram stuff to be able to analyze it in detail. It looks very much like woo).

Also, if I'm allowed to nitpick a bit, a "principle" isn't a theory. It's a loosely stated guideline that's supposed to help narrow down the choices for a new theory. The idea is to only look for new theories in which a statement that's a lot like the "principle" can be proved as a theorem. A few examples and the corresponding theories: Einstein's "postulates" and special relativity. The equivalence principle and general relativity. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics.

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

To say that solids are holograms too would seem to imply that photons can be bunched up together dense enough to form physical matter....??

The word "hologram" is really just an analogy; don't think of it as being literally photons bouncing off a surface. The key point is that you can take every physical law that seems to operate on 3 or 4 dimensions, and reduce it to a different law that works on 2 or 3 dimensions.

Does that mean it's all an illusion? Well, that's a semantic argument, so it's really not possible to answer. But what I would say instead is that key properties of our universe--space, distance, volume, etc.--are emergent. That is to say, there's no "place" where these things have inherent meaning. They just arise from the laws the universe operates on. Even if it's true that these laws are operating on a 2D surface, we still live inside that surface, and from our perspective it's still 3D.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

I concur. The holographic universe, or holographic principle, is extremely cool to the extent that I've been able to 'understand' it. It has nothing to do with minds or frequencies.

It also has nothing to do with the woo that some have attached to the same name.

It's unfortunate, but also no surprise. Quantum mechanics has a ridiculous amount of woo attached to it already, and combining that with something as cool as a hologram only makes it worse. It's too bad, too, because the way the universe really works is much weirder and interesting than any of the nonsense the woo-peddlers come up with.

- Dr. Trintignant