Introduction

Updated 10/7/18

The idea of a holographic universe (or holomovement) as proposed by David Bohm  and supported by others (t Hooft 2000), (Suskind 1995), (Bekenstein 2003), (Sutter 2018), (Afshordi, et al. 2017) is gaining ground with recent observational tests of holographic cosmology. In 2003 Bekenstein said,

Recently, Afshordi’s team used attosecond pulses to film electron motion, producing an image that portrays the electron as a spherical standing wave, which they relate to a holographic image. (Afshordi, et al. 2017)

The “holographic principle” was inspired by black hole thermodynamics and is interpreted to mean that the hologram, i.e. the entity that would carry the holographic information necessary to project a 3-dimensional image, is either on the surface of a gigantic black hole or the outer surface of the universe. (Suskind 1995)

Here’s my question: If the physical universe is a holographic image, then how could this information be produced and projected from the edge of the universe into our 3-dimensional reality as a pattern of images with solid boundaries?

I have been contemplating this since 1992, when I envisioned a quantum particle as a spherical holographic image and set out to learn enough physics to explain and prove it. I already had a BS in physics, so I went back to school and got a master’s. That wasn’t enough. Although we covered Classical Mechanics, Wave Mechanics, Statistical Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics, we barely touched on Relativity theory. And Quantum Field Theory was only mentioned. I wanted to know more but for various reasons, I got my Ph. D. in Medical Physics instead ten years later. For the next 16 years, while serving as a Radiation Health Officer in the Navy, I continued contemplating foundational physics because I felt that there was something about the way that fundamental concepts set us up for particular interpretation. In 2005, I had a eureka moment about the nature of time (see my article in Quest magazine, Timeless Epiphany) that made me reconsider how units of measurement affected our perception and interpretation (see The Nature of Time and Spacetime). I think I have finally come up with a model that can be used to illustrate what I was after from basic principles.  The Holomorphic Process: Understanding the Holographic Nature of Reality as a Metamorphic Process is the preprint version of the paper that describes this model. It is currently in press in the online journal, “Archives of Physics Research” at https://www.scholarsresearchlibrary.com/ and will be included in their November 2018 edition.

The purpose of this blog is just to put the information out there for your consideration and discussion. I don’t expect my paper to be read by many practicing physicists unless I do a good bit more work. If I was a graduate student, I would have had to present this, my thesis, at conferences and to a thesis committee and with their feedback, eventually published in a more reputable journal. But I’m retired so I don’t have a graduate advisor and I’m too tired to enroll. I’m spending more time on the road in my RV and less time in my study.

However, I think that truth is extremely important and finding truth is a team effort. If my approach is correct, I think that it will answer some of the unanswered questions in physics and provide a visual tool and the catalyst for important research on the holographic nature of reality.

Briefly, here’s my approach:

The word “hologram” refers to the imprint of spatial gratings on a film, not the image itself. The gratings are produced by the interference patterns of a laser beam separated into two coherent beams, a signal beam, projected onto an object from outside of the object (and reflected onto the film) and a reference beam, projected directly onto the holographic film. The interference patterns between the two beams are recorded as gratings or fringes on the film. In order to form a holographic image, a reconstruction beam must illuminate the film and be reflected off of the gratings to form a similar pair of beams to those that formed the gratings. These reflections then become reintegrated in space, forming local interference patterns at every point where the original beams had reflected off of the object.

This is a fairly involved process. So the idea that the universe is a “holographic image” from a hologram written on the surface of a black hole somewhere out in space or on the surface of the expanding universe seems ridiculous. In fact, some people (namely Jim Baggott in his book “Farewell to Reality, How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth” (Baggott 2013)) consider it “fairy tale physics” or a new version of the “creation hypothesis” that comes with unanswerable questions. Where did the information come from? Who or what set up the objects, recorded the images and continuously performs the process of projecting the images in real time?

The answer, proposed in my paper, is that the holographic nature of reality is possible because the spatial gratings are not on the surface of a black hole out in space but rather they are spatial frequencies that are transformed into local gratings by relative motion. In essence, our regular 3-D space is both the holographic media and the holographic image. Rather than being written on a black hole or anything else “out there”, the process happens at every point in the universe – the field of motion that separates into space and time that forms holographic fringes in space as it happens. The fringes are quantum bit points and the infinitesimal sphere (represented as a circle in the space-time diagram) surrounding these points, called the “event reference” defining “here” and “now”, forms the patterns of energy in space for the holographic image itself.

Here’s how…

Relative motion is a form of energy, a unitary concept, and it is ubiquitous. And we understand that energy is conserved (it can neither be created nor destroyed, but only changed in form). Physical matter is one form of energy and motion is another. The transformation, or morphing, of motion into matter is the same process described above that makes the hologram:

1) separation, 2) projection, 3) reflection, and 4) reintegration.

The first step is separating motion into two apparently different yet coherent forms. One complicating factor in the current consensus model of physics stems from the way that the “spacetime continuum” is framed as a 4-dimensional tensor. The framework is fundamentally based on the difference between space and time in that space is treated as 3-D and time as 1-D. Mathematically there is nothing wrong with that. It just gets complicated. But Hermann Minkowski initially presented a visual model of spacetime as a symmetric space-time diagram. In this work, the symmetric version of the space-time diagram is used, with motion as the tangent dimension to space and time. Motion is “the real thing,” the form of energy that is conformally projected onto the space-time plane. Space and time are just two different ways of scaling motion, time being the denominator that we normally use as an “independent variable” that quantizes motion, and space the “dependent variable.” In my approach, I use space and time as unitless quantities so that the speed of light is also unitless. This is not new, in fact, in Quantum Field Theory,

We perceive a unit of mass as being constant (in size) so a common way to visualize curved spacetime is to imagine a sphere sitting on a 2-D “fabric of spacetime” that curves continuously “down” toward mass like a funnel. So gravity is seen as the effect of mass “falling” down into the “funnel”. My approach provides the same result (gravity) but I use a different reference and come up with a bitwise process rather than a continuous curve. I use the two forms of quantum energy expressed as a phasor (phase vector) pair in terms of temporal frequency (E=hf) and spatial frequency (E=hc/λ). By superimposing the quantum phasors (scaled as the inverse domain, i.e. 1/space and 1/time) on a relativistic space-time background, I illustrate how the two perspectives (phasor and vector) diverge with motion, causing one phasor to rotate to the left and one to the right, and the relativistic vector to extend outward as a conformal projection, appearing to be magnified by the Lorentz factor. Since relative motion is ubiquitous, the phasors become misaligned with the vector (their slopes) and the misalignment of represents a phase difference between the two perspectives of the same energy, giving rise to the curvature of space. But then, because time is treated as a measure of motion, the reference point on the time axis (the infinitesimal circle at the origin of the plot) also expands and the base of the vector moves to the right on the time axis (forward in time).

At a critical point, the slope of the vector and the slope of the phasor are equal (which happens to be equal to the Golden Ratio), so to an observer, the two look identical to each other but slightly rotated with respect to the original. Rotating the reference frame to line the vector back up with the diagonal (where the speed of light is constant) results in what appears as spin. The same process happens simultaneously with the other phasor, rotating to the right. The reference point on the space axis (the infinitesimal circle at the origin of the plot) also expands and the base of the vector moves up on the space axis (outward in space).

In effect, the fabric of spacetime expanded slightly and then collapsed, pulling the surrounding field (3-D fabric of spacetime) toward the center of the quantum particle. When you look at it like this, every quantum particle is the same as a black hole with a Planck-sized event horizon. Any disturbance in the surrounding field is also pulled toward the center with every event. The event horizon then serves as the boundary between past and future – the inner and outer domains – so any disturbance in the surrounding field Fourier-transforms into bits of information and is effectively stored in “inner space” – the quantum domain, as a reflection of “outer space” and as the gratings required for the formation of a holographic image.