Friends tend to think my passion for the mystery of reality is, to put it tactfully, weird. I am, after all, a writer who majored in English and didn’t take beginning physics at Wellesley for fear of failing. And theoretical physics is where you look if reality really interests you.
It is, after all, a particle astrophysicist at Fermilab who suggests that we may be holograms, and that, in fact, our whole universe may only give the illusion of being three-dimensional.
World's Most Precise Clocks
Developed to Explore Possibility That Universe Is Holographic
Since my age was a single-digit number, I, too, have puzzled over how our being here at all is actually possible — and over what "here" really is. But I never thought about the nature of reality in terms that scientists use, such as: “The holographic principle is a property of quantum gravity theories which resolves the black hole information paradox within string theory.”(http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/h/holographic_principle.htm)
My own less elevated exploration evolved slowly and is marked in memory by discreet events.
As a small child, I asked my father what is at the end of the universe. He said there is no end of the universe. I was skeptical. The illustration in a book of nursery rhymes of Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall became my idea of the end of the universe. On the other side of the wall was nothing, which didn’t concern me (much). Inside that wall were the earth, the sun, the planets, and the stars, in short, the universe.
When I was a little older and awoke from a particularly engrossing dream, I asked my mother how we know the world she and I were talking in is the real world and that our dream world isn’t real. She said, “Because we do.” Much as I respected her grasp of numerous facts beyond my comprehension, I did not find this answer any more satisfying than my father’s assertion that the universe has no end.
At New Trier High School, an older boy I had a crush on wrote in my yearbook, “Thine is the fourth dimension.” Wow! Not Wow! because I was flattered, which I was, but Wow! because it had never occurred to me that there might be a fourth dimension. I mulled this over for years and even bought a perfume called Fourth Dimension, which revealed nothing (in contrast with Shalimar, which inspired a client of a firm I worked for after college to say, “You have no business smelling like that this early in the morning.” But let’s not get distracted by that dimension.)
After I moved to Manhattan, I married twice, had a child, published four books, and gave dinner parties that took three days to plan and recover from (Thanks, Julia Childs.). Three dimensions of reality were more than enough.
Time continued to pass (or, if time is an illusion, seemed to pass). Then, accompanying my husband on a business trip to Toronto, I visited the Science Centre and was captivated by a revelatory exhibit explaining holograms. Here was an aspect of reality that seemed closer, to me, to the strangeness of dreams. Furthermore, that such holograms exist in the waking world made waking reality seem somewhat dreamlike.
On a trip to London, I was leaving Harrods when I spotted a banner on the Victoria and Albert Museum across the street advertising an exhibit of holograms. Jaywalking, I went straight to the holograms and was enchanted and mystified by the variety. Some were created from works in the museum, and I walked around the hologram of the famous crystal skull and examined it from every angle. It looked real. What, then, is real?
In the 1980s, my son brought home from college a book he had read for a science class: Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness by John C. Briggs and F. David Peat. It was and is the most influential book I’ve ever read, because it introduced scientific theories that were in synch with my own suspicion that reality is not what it seems on the surface to be. It went so far as to suggest that, in fact, we live in a holographic universe.
While others were swooning over Paul Newman and then George Clooney, I, too swooned over Paul Newman and then George Clooney. But the third man of my dreams was David Bohm, a physicist who was working on a holographic theory of the universe. As I recall the story, Mrs. Bohm didn’t understand her husband’s work, but she came home from the library with a book by the mystic Krishnamurti, handed it to her husband, and said she thought Krishnamurti and he were doing the same kind of work.
Bohm read the book and, perhaps surprisingly, agreed. He contacted Krishnamurti. The two became great friends for the rest of their lives and lectured together. They had arrived at similar views of reality through different routes—Bohm through physics and Krishnamurti through mysticism. How great is that!
More recently, The Matrix and Inception brought to film audiences intimations that we may live in a reality far stranger than we have in the past imagined. And now scientists at Fermilab are, Wired tells us, creating an experiment to discover if—
Our existence could be coded in a finite bandwidth, like a live ultra-high-definition 3-D video. And the third dimension we know and love could be no more than a holographic projection of a 2-D surface. [Italics are mine.]
I read further, in an article I can’t now locate, that the Fermilab experiment may show that our universe does perhaps end—and is encircled by holograms that enclose our universe, while everything that happens here is a projection of what happens there. Now we're getting somewhere. Maybe.
If, as Shakespeare wrote, “We are such things as dreams are made of,’’ and if we are, in some sense, holograms, then is our dream world, in some sense, as real as our waking life?
Not that figuring any of this out is apt to change daily life. But it would be thrilling to know.
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