We are Holograms
It may be news to you and it may need an explanation, but here it is: You are a hologram.
And while this second statement may not appear to be as speculative, it still needs to be said considering the first statement: You are real.
As the first declaration is likely on your mind I’ll deal with it to begin, however I will say now that it is the second statement that will take a greater leap of faith in order to believe; in fact, reality as we know it will in the end depend on philosophy.
A last statement before this op-ed: I promise this is all easily understood.
There are four ideas that need to be brought up before we go much further. The first two — which are based in science — explain how we get into this mess to begin with; that we are holograms. The third — based in logic-bound philosophy — explains why this all makes perfect sense. And the fourth, well shoot, the fourth puts a shiny bow on everything… Don’t you just love arguments that wrap up nicely?
All in all, I think it’s a fairly reasonable trade off here; read a few hundred words an in exchange for an understanding of our existence?!? Deal? Deal!!
1) We Are All Holograms
It’s true! At least it looks like that’s the case… Check it out. In sum, the recent works of a team of physicists led by Yoshifumi Hyakutake has mathematically reconciled many of the propositions put forth in 1997 by theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena (perhaps more accurately, the current work supports the theories that Maldacena built upon).
Maldacena’s theory of the universe suggests that all that we see, all that we are, is the result of a resonance (or is the by-product, the projection, a hologram, a vibration, a wave-length resultant) of an incredibly complex interplay of particles that is occurring in a central, 'original' dimension.
In this dimension there is no gravity, and space is vastly different from our common understanding of it; I mean, we think of space as stars and a bunch of empty area, right? That’s not what space is in this dimension though — it’s best described as flat and dense. And in this flat and dense cosmos, the particles — like all things — move, which causes friction and vibration. At a cosmic level, these vibrations — these intense and constant humming's in the "central" and "original" dimension — have, in their oscillation, spawned a series of unimaginably large strings of by-products (which are fed through what is described as a "holographic way", as in gateway, and they transmit "stuff" like gravity. Don’t you love my exceptionally technical language?). While the "original" feeds these strings of by-products via continual resonance, the "original" is in return fed cosmically-scaled reverberations (or counter-vibrations, tides, resonances) by the strings of by-products.
These "vibrations" or "waves" or "strings," which are by-products of the "original" dimension, include the thing that we commonly think of as our universe; this is a misnomer though, as the universe refers to everything, and therefore would include the "original" and any other "vibrations" or "waves" or "strings" that may exist, regardless of whether or not they are visible to us (and thus a part of our mental concept of the universe). According to Maldacena’s theory, there are several vibrating strings, each home to millions of galaxies, swaths of dark matter, each with black holes, stars, planets, etc. (or in other words, there are several area’s that we commonly call a ‘"universe"), and that is one of the reasons this thesis is commonly called 'string theory'.
Wipe your brow off! We’ve gotten past the first, biggest and most important step — we now understand Maldacena’s theory (kind of, not really though, but in the most basic of terms)! So there is step one, step two is to explain why this makes sense.
We now turn to (and only for a moment and in the simplest of terms, I promise) the work of Einstein as well as the papers developed by Hyakutake’s team. First of all, Einstein’s Theory of Gravity was disrupted by certain issues with quantum physics, which became evident in observation of black holes. Einstein knew that his theory, which otherwise made sense, couldn’t be true if there were even these slight inconsistencies at any level; so what was happening? Einstein posited concepts like white holes to try and resolve the issues, but even they didn’t make perfect sense... Well, Maldacena’s theory entirely reconciles these problems.
The only issue with Maldacena’s theory — the one where we are simply the result of oscillations in the "original" which is fueling the projection of seemingly real cosmos — was that there wasn’t any proof that it was true beyond the fact that it reconciled the issues relating to Einstein’s work (which was in itself a huge accomplishment). Well, the papers published by Hyakutake’s team has mathematically validated Maldacena’s work by narrowing in on the event horizon of black holes; in calculating the entropy and energy transfer that appears to occur in a black holes event horizon and comparing these figures against the proposed transfers in that should occur as hypothesized by Maldacena, the team was able to see if there was a correlation in our cosmos with the theory; there was. They data lined up with the theory… Perfectly.
It needs to be said that this is not absolute, undeniable proof of Maldacena’s hologram theory; no, it is a mathematical positive that suggests he is right. A computation that suggest that you, I and everything we see are simply the projected vibrations of an "original dimension" that is all but unknown to us — the by-product of a plateau where time, gravity, and space exist among a group of particles in way that is all but entirely alien to us, in a way that is capable of conducting, managing, and oscillating everything that has and will exist. I know, wow…
If you believe this is possible (and I’m going to move forward hoping that you do), the rest will be easier to understand. If you don’t (yet) buy into the idea please hold on until the end of this article, it will make (even more) sense soon…
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