The Holographic Universe

"Before I get to gravity, I need to explain what holograms are."

"Holograms?"

"Yes, holograms."

"Like the ones in sci-fi movies?"

"Yes."

"What do holograms have to do with reality?"

"An awful lot, actually. You know, I began questioning reality about five years ago. I became suspicious that there was more to it than what authority figures had told me. Their 'truths' about the world weren't matching up with my personal experience. My life just seemed too ordered. Even the 'bad' stuff seemed too organized — like there was a deep underlying structure to it all. I saw order in everything — even things that others brushed off as random. There was this rhythm to it, like music or art.

In fact, I remember when I was a child, my parents took us to see a Monet exhibition. Monet had these massive paintings, and when you'd look at them up close, they appeared to be a mishmash of random brush strokes; chaos. You couldn't see the order in it all. But if you walked backward and zoomed out, there they were: beautiful lilies in a pond. All the individual brushstrokes combined to create a magnificently ordered artwork, just like all the individual pixels on a computer screen are meaningless when viewed up close but combine to create an emergent illusion."

"Now, do you remember that book I was telling you about earlier?"

"You mean 'A Beginner's Guide To BDSM?'" Zac asked.

"What? No! What the hell-"

"Oh, oh, my mistake. You were obviously referring to 'Fantastic STIs And Where To Find Them.'"

"Grow up, Zac."

"No," he said firmly. "When I was fourteen, I took my sense of humor into the backyard, loaded him onto a homemade spacecraft, and sent him hurtling through space at close to the speed of light. All that, so he would never have to age at the same rate I do. I still miss him." Zac wiped a fake tear from his eye.

"Very clever," I said. "But the book I am referring to is The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. That book came up on my Amazon suggestions years ago, and I found its description alluring. I was on the verge of buying it until I realized it wasn't available on Kindle, and I couldn't be bothered waiting for it to arrive in Australia from the US. The printed edition was quite expensive at the time, and I had no income after 99dresses failed, so I just didn't purchase it.

A few days later, I went to Bryce and Pandora's place to drink wine and watch the latest trainwreck episode of the US Bachelor. As I was walking past their bookshelf, something caught my eye. There, hidden in the corner, was an old copy of The Holographic Universe.

I was a bit surprised, to say the least. That book is on an esoteric topic, and it was published the year I was born. It seems to be a solid perennial seller, but not exactly a mainstream, common book. That’s why it was odd that it was sitting on their bookshelf — a bookshelf I had literally walked past a gazillion times-”

"I very much doubt you had literally walked past it a gazillion times."

"Fine," I said. "I had literally walked past that bookshelf a thousand times and never noticed it — but that day I did. A 'rational' human might say it was confirmation bias because I was thinking about books recently. But the truth is, I buy books all the time. And there, on that day, that particular book was sitting on that particular bookshelf in my path. It was as if it had been there for years, just waiting for me to pick it up."

"Ah," Zac grinned. "It's like finding an Aztec death whistle in a Sydney-based secondhand shop, right after I had a conversation about it with you."

"That's precisely what it was like. One minute I was considering buying this book, and then I decided not to. A few days later, it found its way into my hands anyway, via a different path. One could even call it a path of least resistance. A parsimonious path. If it had shown up on my doorstep without me ordering it, that would have been very surprising and uncanny. Or if I would have just found a copy lying on the sidewalk, that would have been very shocking and weird and suspicious based on my belief system. And yes, I was surprised to find it on their bookshelf — surprised enough to think twice about it. But it wasn't a ridiculous avenue through which to acquire the book. If the book dropped from the sky and hit me on the head, that would have been ridiculous.

Now, some people might say 'Coincidence? Nikki, you're finding patterns where there are none. Everyone knows your thoughts cannot affect your outer reality.' But as we've already established, I don't place much credence in what 'everyone knows.' To quote Einstein, 'common sense is a set of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.' Some people just have no sense of curiosity.

Anyway, I asked Bryce where he bought the book. He actually found it in a garage sale. I borrowed the book and inhaled it within a day or two. It was the most magical, alluring, fantastic, beautiful thing I had ever read. For the first time in my life, someone was able to articulate this deep, underlying, intuitive feeling that I'd had since I was a child. It was a portal into a completely new way of seeing the world: a universe operating on holographic principles."

"Cool story, Hansel," Zac said, giving his best Zoolander impression. "I still have no clue what you mean by holograms and holographic principles, though."

"Patience, young padawan!" I threw another grape at him. "I'm getting to it."

Zac caught the grape in his mouth, and I continued. "Let's start by talking about David Bohm."

"The guy you quoted earlier, in your melodramatic soliloquy?"

"Yes, Zac. Very perceptive of you. He's the brilliant physicist who said, 'a great many people think that they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.'

David Bohm studied plasmas in the 1930s or 40s — I can't quite remember when. Did you ever go to one of those science museums when you were a kid? They had those glass balls full of lightning there. You'd place your hand on the glass, and the lightning would gather around your fingertips."

"Oh, yes!" Zac said. "And it would make your hair stand up?"

"That's the one! That's a plasma. In plasmas, Bohm noticed that electrons stopped behaving like individuals and started acting as if they were part of an interconnected whole. If you analyzed their movements individually, they appeared random, like chaotic brush strokes in a Monet painting. But if you zoomed out and assessed the electrons as a group, their movements were surprisingly organized, like a landscape of Monet's lilies.

Bohm frequently had the impression that the electron sea was 'alive.' It could move around like an amoeboid creature — regenerating itself, enclosing impurities like a biological organism encloses foreign substances in a cyst. It was as if each electron knew what trillions of other electrons were doing.

Bohm became fascinated with this idea of order and interconnectedness, especially as it pertained to quantum physics. He came to believe that there was no such thing as true disorder — just order that became increasingly more hidden, like the 'random' movements of electrons in plasmas. Then one day, he came across a device that captured his imagination."

I pulled up a video on Youtube and pressed play.

"If you place a few drops of ink in the bath of glycerine, then turn the handle clockwise, the ink will disperse into a disordered mess, with all the colors mixed together. You can then turn the handle in the opposite direction, and the ink will reassemble back into individual drops again. Can you see how there is a deeply hidden order embedded in the dispersed ink's disordered appearance?"

"Yeah," Zac said. "That's pretty cool."

"I know!" I agreed. "When I first saw this, it felt like a beautiful metaphor for what I'd always felt about life: that there's incredible order embedded in the chaos. Bohm had similar ideas, although his were more focused on explaining quantum physics. A few years later, he came across an even better metaphor that helped him develop his ideas: holograms. So firstly, do you know what a hologram is?"

"No clue, besides that they are in Star Wars," Zac said.