The Holographic Universe (7 page)

Bohm's ideas still left
most physicists unpersuaded, but did stir the interest of a few. One of these
was John Stewart Bell, a theoretical physicist at CERN, a center for peaceful
atomic research near Geneva, Switzerland. Like Bohm, Bell had also become
discontented with quantum theory and felt there must be some alternative. As he
later said, “Then in 1952 I saw Bohm's paper. His idea was to complete quantum
mechanics by saying there are certain variables in addition to those which
everybody knew about That impressed me very much.”

Bell also realized that
Bohm's theory implied the existence of nonlocality and wondered if there was
any way of experimentally verifying its existence. The question remained in the
back of his mind for years until a sabbatical in 1964 provided him with the
freedom to focus his full attention on the matter. Then he quickly came up with
an elegant mathematical proof that revealed how such an experiment could be
performed. The only problem was that it required a level of technological
precision that was not yet available. To be certain that particles, such as
those in the EPR paradox, were not using some normal means of communication,
the basic operations of the experiment had to be performed in such an
infinitesimally brief instant that there wouldn't even be enough time for a ray
of light to cross the distance separating the two particles. This meant that
the instruments used in the experiment had to perform all of the necessary
operations within a few thousand-millionths of a second.

Enter the
Hologram

By the late 1950s Bohm
had already had his run-in with McCarthyism and had become a research fellow at
Bristol University, England. There, along with a young research student named
Yakir Aharonov, he discovered another important example of nonlocal
interconnectedness. Bohm and Aharonov found that under the right circumstances
an electron is able to “feel” the presence of a magnetic field that is in a
region where there is zero probability of finding the electron. This phenomenon
is now known as the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and when the two men first published
their discovery, many physicists did not believe such an effect was possible.
Even today there is enough residual skepticism that, despite confirmation of
the effect in numerous experiments, occasionally papers still appear arguing
that it doesn't exist.

As always, Bohm
stoically accepted his continuing role as the voice in the crowd that bravely
notes the emperor has no clothes. In an interview conducted some years later he
offered a simple summation of the philosophy underlying his courage: “In the
long run it is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the
actual fact is.”

Nevertheless, the
limited response to his ideas about wholeness and nonlocality and his own
inability to see how to proceed further caused him to focus his attention in
other directions. In the 1960s this led him to take a closer look at
order.
Classical science generally divides things into two categories: those that
possess order in the arrangement of their parts and those whose parts are
disordered, or random, in arrangement. Snowflakes, computers, and living things
are all ordered. The pattern a handful of spilled coffee beans makes on the
floor, the debris left by an explosion, and a series of numbers generated by a
roulette wheel are all disordered.

As Bohm delved more
deeply into the matter he realized there were also different degrees of order.
Some things were much more ordered than other things, and this implied that
there was, perhaps, no end to the hierarchies of order that existed in the
universe. From this it occurred to Bohm that maybe things that we perceive as
disordered aren't disordered at all. Perhaps their order is of such an
“indefinitely high degree” that they only appear to us as random
(interestingly, mathematicians are unable to prove randomness, and although
some sequences of numbers are categorized as random, these are only educated
guesses).

While immersed in these
thoughts, Bohm saw a device on a BBC television program that helped him develop
his ideas even further. The device was a specially designed jar containing a
large rotating cylinder. The narrow space between the cylinder and the jar was
filled with glycerine—a thick, clear liquid—and floating motionlessly in the
glycerine was a drop of ink. What interested Bohm was that when the handle on
the cylinder was turned, the drop of ink spread out through the syrupy
glycerine and seemed to disappear. But as soon as the handle was turned back in
the opposite direction, the faint tracing of ink slowly collapsed upon itself
and once again formed a droplet. Bohm writes, “This immediately struck me as
very relevant to the question of order, since, when the ink drop was spread
out, it still had a ‘hidden’ (i.e., nonmanifest) order that was revealed when
it was reconstituted. On the other hand, in our usual language, we would say
that the ink was in a state of ‘disorder’ when it was diffused through the
glycerine. This led me to see that new notions of order must be involved here.”

This discovery excited
Bohm greatly, for it provided him with a new way of looking at many of the
problems he had been contemplating. Soon after coming across the
ink-in-glycerine device he encountered an even better metaphor for
understanding order, one that enabled him not only to bring together all the
various strands of his years of thinking, but did so with such force and
explanatory power it seemed almost tailor-made for the purpose. That metaphor
was the hologram.

As soon as Bohm began to
reflect on the hologram he saw that it
too
provided a new way of
understanding order. Like the ink drop in its dispersed state, the interference
patterns recorded on a piece of holographic film also appear disordered to the
naked eye. Both possess orders that are hidden or
enfolded
in much the
same way that the order in a plasma is enfolded in the seemingly random
behavior of each of its electrons. But this was not the only insight the
hologram provided.

The more Bohm thought
about it the more convinced he became that the universe actually employed
holographic principles in its operations,
was itself a kind of giant,
flowing hologram
, and this realization allowed him to crystallize all of
his various insights into a sweeping and cohesive whole. He published his first
papers on his holographic view of the universe in the early 1970s, and in 1980
he presented a mature distillation of his thoughts in a book entitled
Wholeness
and the Implicate Order.
In it he did more than just link his myriad ideas
together. He transfigured them into a new way of looking at reality that was as
breathtaking as it was radical.

Enfolded Orders
and Unfolded Realities

One of Bohm's most
startling assertions is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is
really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image. Underlying it is a deeper
order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth
to all the objects and appearances of our physical world in much the same way
that a piece of holographic film gives birth to a hologram. Bohm calls this
deeper level of reality the
implicate
(which means “enfolded”) order,
and he refers to our own level of existence as the
explicate
, or
unfolded, order. He uses these terms because he sees the manifestation of all
forms in the universe as the result of countless enfoldings and unfoldings
between these two orders. For example, Bohm believes an electron is not one
thing but a totality or ensemble enfolded throughout the whole of space. When
an instrument detects the presence of a single electron it is simply because
one aspect of the electron's ensemble has unfolded, similar to the way an ink
drop unfolds out of the glycerine, at that particular location. When an
electron appears to be moving it is due to a continuous series of such
unfoldments and enfoldments.

Put another way,
electrons and all other particles are no more substantive or permanent than the
form a geyser of water takes as it gushes out of a fountain. They are sustained
by a constant influx from the implicate order, and when a particle appears to
be destroyed, it is not lost. It has merely enfolded back into the deeper order
from which it sprang. A piece of holographic film and the image it generates
are also an example of an implicate and explicate order. The film is an
implicate order because the image encoded in its interference patterns is a
hidden totality enfolded throughout the whole. The hologram projected from the
film is an explicate order because it represents the unfolded and perceptible
version of the image.

The constant and flowing
exchange between the two orders explains how particles, such as the electron in
the positronium atom, can shape-shift from one kind of particle to another.
Such shiftings can be viewed as one particle, say an electron, enfolding back
into the implicate order while another, a photon, unfolds and takes its place.
It also explains how a quantum can manifest as either a particle or a wave.
According to Bohm, both aspects are always enfolded in a quantum's ensemble,
but the way an observer interacts with the ensemble determines which aspect
unfolds and which remains hidden. As such, the role an observer plays in
determining the form a quantum takes may be no more mysterious than the fact
that the way a jeweler manipulates a gem determines which of its facets become
visible and which do not. Because the term
hologram
usually refers to an
image that is static and does not convey the dynamic and ever active nature of
the incalculable enfoldings and unfoldings that moment by moment create our
universe, Bohm prefers to describe the universe not as a hologram, but as a
“holomovement.”

The existence of a
deeper and holographically organized order also explains why reality becomes
nonlocal at the subquantum level. As we have seen, when something is organized
holographically, all semblance of location breaks down. Saying that every part
of a piece of holographic film contains all the information possessed by the
whole is really just another way of saying that the information is distributed
nonlocally. Hence, if the universe is organized according to holographic
principles, it, too, would be expected to have nonlocal properties.

The Undivided
Wholeness of All Things

Most mind-boggling of
all are Bohm's fully developed ideas about wholeness. Because everything in the
cosmos is made out of the seamless holographic fabric of the implicate order,
he believes it is as meaningless to view the universe as composed of “parts,”
as it is to view the different geysers in a fountain as separate from the water
out of which they flow. An electron is not an “elementary particle.” It is just
a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement. Dividing reality up into
parts and then naming those parts is always arbitrary, a product of convention,
because subatomic particles, and everything else in the universe, are no more
separate from one another than different patterns in an ornate carpet.

This is a profound suggestion.
In his general theory of relativity Einstein astounded the world when he said
that space and time are not separate entities, but are smoothly linked and part
of a larger whole he called the space-time continuum. Bohm takes this idea a
giant step further. He says that
everything
in the universe is part of a
continuum. Despite the apparent separateness of things at the explicate level,
everything is a seamless extension of everything else, and ultimately even the
implicate and explicate orders blend into each other.

Take a moment to
consider this. Look at your hand. Now look at the light streaming from the lamp
beside you. And at the dog resting at your feet You are not merely made of the
same things.
You are the same thing.
One thing. Unbroken. One enormous
something that has extended its uncountable arms and appendages into all the
apparent objects, atoms, restless oceans, and twinkling stars in the cosmos.

Bohm cautions that this
does not mean the universe is a giant undifferentiated mass. Things can be part
of an undivided whole and still possess their own unique qualities. To
illustrate what he means he points to the little eddies and whirlpools that
often form in a river. At a glance such eddies appear to be separate things and
possess many individual characteristics such as size, rate, and direction of
rotation, et cetera. But careful scrutiny reveals that it is impossible to
determine where any given whirlpool ends and the river begins. Thus, Bohm is
not suggesting that the differences between “things” is meaningless. He merely
wants us to be aware constantly that dividing various aspects of the
holomovement into “things” is always an abstraction, a way of making those
aspects stand out in our perception by our way of thinking. In attempts to correct
this, instead of calling different aspects of the holomovement “things,” he
prefers to call them “relatively independent subtotalities.”

Indeed, Bohm believes
that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic
interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not
only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we
believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the
whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be
concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our
society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the
problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues
passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only
doesn't work, but may even lead to our extinction.