Does Objective Reality Exist?

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In 1982, a remarkable event took place.  At the University of Paris, a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century.  You did not hear about it on the evening news.  In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances, subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them.  It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow, each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.  The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.  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 Aspect's findings.  But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes 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 Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms.

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 co-mingle) 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 will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. 

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be 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 labored 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 something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, but rather we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery.  Bohm believes 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.  He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish.  Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities.  After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different.  But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.  When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side.  If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the "two" fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another; but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium.  And, he adds, we view objects (such as subatomic particles) as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose.  And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features.  If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.  The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize, pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial, and all of Nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals.  Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this

deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present and future all exist simultaneously.  This suggests that

given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question.