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The Holographic Principle
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee;
but the night shineth as the day:
the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. (Ps 139:12)
A. What Is a Hologram?
The term âholographic imageâ is often popularly conflated with âhologram.â Here, I will use the two words âhologramâ and âholographâ fairly interchangeably, reflecting their use in popular culture. Technically, the two terms âhologramâ and âholographâ denote different elements of holography. A holographic image is like a three-dimensional photograph. When we talk about holograms in casual conversations about science fiction movies or three-dimensional pictures like those on postcards or childrenâs playing cards, we frequently mean holographic images. Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes a hologram as âa picture of a âwholeâ object.â Science writer Chris Woodford calls a hologram âa cross between what happens when you take a photograph and what happens when you look at something for real.â
A photograph records patterns of light. The light reflected by a certain object is captured by the photograph, creating a two-dimensional picture of the object. Coined by Sir John Herschel in 1839, the word âphotographâ explains the process of taking a photograph. The first half of the word, photo-, is derived from the Greek Ïáż¶Ï (phĆs), âlightâ; the second, -graph, is from ÎłÏÎŹÏÎżÏ (graphĆs), related to the verb form ÎłÏÎŹÏÏ (graphĆ): âto write,â âto inscribe,â or âto draw,â all developed from an original sense of âscratch.â The process of making a âgraphâ involves inscribing and drawing or marking. Accordingly, a photograph inscribes and records the light that bounces off an object.
A holograph records light more accurately and realistically than a conventional photograph. While a photograph is flat, a hologram is three-dimensional. It looks as if it has length, width, and height. It can also look as if it is moving in relation to the person who is looking at it. Holograms are created by shining a split laser beam on an object. When we recombine the different parts of the original beam before it was split, we have a recording of how the object appears from multiple angles. The holographic recording captures an image of the object as more than a flat surface in a picture, and as something with depth, shape, and other 3D elements.
A hologram is the imprint produced in the process of recording the holographic image, which, again, is a 3D picture of something. (Notably, as recognized in legal contexts, a holograph is something that is specifically handwritten by its author. What does this imply about the universe having an author?) The 3D picture of a holographic image is a whole picture. In fact, this terminology reflects the etymology for the word âholograph.â The word is taken from the ancient Greek words áœ
Î»ÎżÏ (holos), meaning âwholeâ or âentire,â and ÎłÏÎŹÏÎżÏ (graphos), derived from the same verb as the ending of photo-graph, ÎłÏÎŹÏÏ (graphĆ). A holograph is something that is recorded in its entirety.
B. The Universe as a Holographic Image
The âholographic principleâ came to the fore in the 1990s as a response to earlier questions about what happens when information âfalls intoâ a black hole in space. At the time, scientists were working to figure out how black holes fit into the laws of thermodynamics. A black hole is an extremely dense object in outer space. It is created when âso much mass or energy gathers in a small volume that gravitational forces overwhelm all others and everything collapses under its own weight.â The material in the object gathers into a tiny condensed area called âthe singularity,â surrounded by a conceptual threshold between âblack hole spaceâ and ânormal space.â There are at least four different types of black holes.
Originally, black holes presented a problem related to the laws of thermodynamics. According to the first law, conservation of energy, all of the energy in the universe remains constant. Even though energy can change form, it cannot be created or destroyed. The second law describes the process of entropy. Entropy is the increasing disorder in the universe as energy changes into less usable forms. Every time energy is transferred, the transferral involves work. Some energy is lost: it becomes less usable. The universe is always increasing in entropy, moving closer to disorder and reducing its usable energy.
But what about energy and black holes? If everything that goes into a black hole disappears forever, as Einsteinâs laws of relativity predicted, is the entropy lost? In trying to answer this question through mathematical models, physicists concluded that the second law of thermodynamics is upheld. Their findings also suggested something else that was very interesting: the amount of information inside a bounded physical system, like a black hole, is reflected in the systemâs surface area. Entropy is related to area, and not to volume. In other words, all of the information contained in the system is encoded on the surface. When it comes to a black hole, what you see really is what you get, because you see on the surface everything that the black hole contains.
This revelation was astonishing. It changes the way we think about information and space. Every bit of information inside something that is three-dimensional is actually visible as a two-dimensional picture on the same objectâs surface. The 3D picture is not what shows from the outside. Instead, itâs defined by its 2D boundaries. Someone outside of a contained system sees all of the information inside the system like a 2D flat picture, and not a 3D region with shapes and contours. The same principle is thought to apply to the âsystemâ that is our universe and its contents. We may think our world is built of shapes, but from the outside, the shapes are flat, like geometrical planes drawn on a piece of paper.
Of course, our universe has more than two or three dimensions. Time is widely recognized as the fourth dimension. Currently, string theory postulates ten dimensions in the universe. Other more hypothetical versions of superstring theory posit twenty-six dimensions. Chuck Missler has noted that Nachmanides (AD 1194â1270), a scholar of ancient Hebrew, deduced the existence of ten dimensions from studying the book of Genesis alone. Missler gives a possible contextualization for the dimensions: