introduction
"One flower and one world, one sand and one country, the palm of the king is boundless, and the moment contains eternal calamity." , these are a few lines from a poem by the late 18th and early 19th century English poet Willam Blake. If we replace these sentences with a large vernacular, it can basically be said that the part is the whole, or that the part contains all the information of the whole. The meaning is very close to holographic theory. As early as 1948, the British physicist Gabo proposed the principle of holography. First, all the information that describes the 3D picture is encoded on the pattern on the 2D film. Three-dimensional spatial information can be reproduced on a plane (two-dimensional). The second is that the part contains the overall information, such as a photo with a portrait inside; If we cut this photo in half, from any half we can see the original complete portrait; If we tear it into many, many pieces, we can still see the complete image from each small fragment. Such a photo is called a hologram. The advent of lasers, made holographic technology and theory shine. Gabo also won the Nobel Prize in 1971.
A hologram and life
Michael Talbot is an American science fiction writer whose book The Holographic Universe was a bestseller back in 1991. He believes that our world is nothing more than a giant hologram. In this book, he introduces not only the Bohm hologram view, but also Georgetown and Stanford neurobiologist and physiologist Carl Smith. Karl Pribram's theory of the holographic brain, which originated in the American psychologist Carl Pribram in the twenties of the last century. Karl Lashley's work, Lesley found that no matter what part of the mouse's brain is removed, it does not affect the mouse's memory. This characteristic of the existence of the whole in part is exactly what holography has, and after Pribram knew the concept of holography, a set of holographic theories of the brain was gradually developed in the late sixties and early seventies to explain this phenomenon. The holographic model of the brain is gaining more and more support.
Almost at the same time, Zhang Yingqing of China discovered in 1973 that there is an ordered group of acupuncture points on the side of the second metacarpal in humans, and later discovered the holographic law of acupuncture points. Later, based on these findings, Zhang Yingqing proposed the holographic embryo theory of living things.
More and more scientists, especially psychologists, are applying holographic theory to explain supernatural mystical experiences, near-death experiences, and premonitions. Do holographic views or laws exist only in biological processes? Apparently not. Let's go back in history, maybe we can get more inspiration.
2. A well-known scientific public case
In the history of human thought, there is a very interesting phenomenon that the same idea is sometimes proposed by different people from different ways almost contemporaneously. Before we return to information theory, let's look at a famous public case of modern science: Einstein and Bohr's debate on quantum mechanics. Einstein is already well known, and the name of Boll, another modern scientific giant, may not be known so much outside the physics community. Bohr is the founder of quantum theory and one of the important founders of quantum mechanics. The Institute of Theoretical Physics founded by Bohr was a recognized world physical research center in the twenties and thirties. Bohr's "principle of complementarity" and Heisenberg's "uncertainty relation" form the two main pillars of the Copenhagen School's interpretation of quantum mechanics. After 1927, it was gradually accepted by most physicists. Therefore, it is known as the "orthodox" interpretation of quantitative mechanics.
One of the defining events of the Einstein and Bohr controversy was the formulation of the EPR Itch (1935). EPR is the first letter of the surnames of the three authors, including Einstein.The core idea of EPR is reflected in two aspects of the Einstein and Bohr argument, one is locality, that is, all signals or energy cannot be transmitted faster than light (this is determined by special relativity and is also the physical basis of causality). 。 The probability explanation of quantum mechanics is unacceptable, and there should be variables (or hidden variables) that are not recognized by people, which can be used to describe and accurately predict the behavior of physical systems, and explain the microscopic world with probability, indicating that quantum mechanics is incomplete. In a word, "God does not throw grains".
In fact, as early as 1927, de Broglie (who won the Nobel Prize for proposing the wave theory of electrons) proposed the idea of hidden variables based on the assumption of locality, trying to remove Copenhagen's explanation of the probability of quantum mechanics, but de Broglie's theory could not withstand the cross-examination of Pauli (who won the Nobel Prize for proposing the principle of incompatibility), and finally de Broglie abandoned this idea. By 1952, David. David Bohm proposed non-locality, hidden variables, quantum mechanics to explain microscopic phenomena. The two most important points of Bohm theory are non-locality and determinism.
The universe is a whole and fluid
David mentioned above. Bohm was an American physicist and considered by many to be one of the great physical thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in the United States, he was persecuted by McCarthyism in the fifties, moved to Brazil, and finally settled in England.
Influenced by the idea of hidden variables, another important figure, John . John Bell proposed the famous Bell theorem, the Bell inequality, in 1964. Bell's theorem states that if a local impovert variable exists, then Bell's inequality holds. However, in 1982, French physicist Alain Aspect and others experimentally proved that Bell's inequality does not hold. This conclusion is amazing. The popular explanation is that under certain conditions, microscopic particles, such as two entangled electrons, are emitted in opposite directions at the same time, no matter how far away they are from each other (such as one light-year), when one party is affected and changes state, the other party also changes. Since no information or energy can exceed the speed of light, the understanding of the results of this experiment has inspired a variety of theories. One of them is Bohm's holomovement.
In the sixties, Bohm met Christ Krishnamurti, an Indian philosopher and religious figure who was hugely influential in the tenth century, and Krishnamurti was considered by both Hinduism and Buddhists as an enlightened person and teacher. Influenced by Krishnamurti and Bohm's original understanding of the quantum world, Bohm gradually developed the concept of holographic motion.
Bohm believed that all objects, events, existences, and even structures are abstracted from processes. Everything is changing, everything is flowing. This is very close to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus' idea that everything flows. It is also very similar to the ideas of the Chinese I Ching. Bohm used the hologram model to illustrate his ideas, and Bohm believed that in the quantum world, particles are in contact with each other, no matter how far away they are from each other, they are inseparable, and their separation is an illusion.
To make it easier for people to understand his hypothesis, Bohm gives the following icon: Imagine an aquarium with a fish in it. Assuming you can't see the aquarium directly, your observations of it come from two television cameras, one directly in front of the aquarium and the other on the side. When you look at two TV monitors, you might think that the fish on two screens are two. After all, because the camera is at a different angle, the resulting image will be slightly different.
But as you continue to look at the two fish, you will perceive that there is a specific connection between the two, and the movements are synchronized. When one fish turns, the other will also make a coordinated turn; When one is facing ahead, the other is always facing the side. If you are not aware of the whole situation, you may conclude that the two fish must be telepathically interacting with each other. But apparently this is not the case. Bohm wants to say that this is exactly what happened with subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.
According to Bohm, the phenomenon of faster-than-light connections between subatomic particles (more precisely non-local) is actually telling us that reality has a deeper level that we do not observe, a more complex space beyond our space, like the aquarium. And, he adds, we think of subatomic particles as separate individuals because we see only parts of their reality. Such a particle is not a separate "part", but a deeper and more fundamental whole, which has the structure of holographic photography. And since everything in reality is made up of these phantom particles, the entire universe is basically a projection, a holographic illusion.
Because the surface separation of subatomic particles is an illusion, it means that at a deeper level of reality, everything in the universe is ultimately interconnected. Everything interacts with everything, and although it is human nature to classify and deal with phenomena in the universe, all classification is a necessary illusion, and the ultimate essence of everything is a flawless giant net, and all existence is only an abstraction in the cosmic process.
IV. The universe is an illusion
Starting from the basic explanation of quantum mechanics and the integrity of quantum, Bohm obtained the same or similar philosophical ideas as holography to explain the universe after twenty years of thinking and research. Bohm is not alone, let's take a look at the conclusions reached by some other physicists. As a contemporary physicist, few people are as good as S. Hawking. Hawking) is widely known, his A Brief History of Time is also a bestseller, and he became the de facto ambassador of physics. Hawking was an initiator of applying quantum mechanics to black hole theory. Before 1974, physicists believed that once a black hole formed, it would swallow everything that came close to it due to its strong gravity. But Hawking proposed that black holes also evaporate (radiant energy) while losing mass. This radiation, also known as "Hawking radiation", is a major advance in the study of black holes in cosmology.
But in 1976, Hawking published another article showing that black hole radiation does not contain any information inside the black hole, and that all information is lost after the black hole is lost. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, information cannot be completely erased, and Hawking's statement has a contradiction, which is the famous "black hole information paradox". To solve this paradox, Dutch physicist (who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1999) Gerard't Hooft proposed the holographic principle in 1993: he believed that the three-dimensional information in a black hole could be completely encoded on the black hole's two-dimensional event horizon. This is no different from a three-dimensional image of an object encoded on a two-dimensional hologram. That is, what happens in any region of space-time can equivalently explain what happens on the boundary of that region. Although we generally think of objects as always moving in three-dimensional space, we can also equivalently think of them as flat spots moving on a two-dimensional plane.
Writing this, we also have to tear the topic away a little. We also have to start with Einstein, who created the general theory of relativity and spent the rest of his life engaged in theoretical work that unified gravity and electromagnetism. This is probably influenced by Newton and Maxwell, who summarized the work of Galileo, Tycho and Kepler to create Newtonian mechanics and the theory of gravity. Maxwell gathered the work of Faraday and others, unified electricity and magnetism within the electrodynamic equations, and created classical electrodynamics. But Einstein's efforts to unify electromagnetism and gravity hit the wall. Until he drove the crane west in 1955, he did not complete his goal. Perhaps, this has something to do with the fact that when he started working on this work (in the twenties of the last century), the strong interaction and the weak interaction had not yet been discovered, or maybe the work was too difficult.
Because nature has four basic forces (which have been discovered), in addition to electromagnetic and gravitational, there is also a strong interaction force (nuclear force) and a weak interaction force. Unifying the four forces within a theoretical framework has always been one of the goals pursued by theoretical physicists. Superstring theory, which was conceived in the forties and fifties and originated in the late sixties, has gone through the ups and downs of the so-called two revolutions, and finally became the Theory of everything, that is, M-theory, which has the most promising goal of achieving the goals of physicists.
Terhooft's holographic ideas were articulated by another physics Nobel Prize winner, Leonard Susskind (one of the founders of cosmic holographic ideas), using superstring theory. Terhoft and Susskind went a step further and extended the holographic principle to the entire universe. They explain that as we observe the universe, a whole, also has its horizon, and that light from the other side of the cosmic horizon cannot reach the Earth (within the life of the universe). Other string theorists have also shown that the laws of physics are the same in a five-dimensional universe as they are in four-dimensional space.
When we use the holographic principle to explain the non-localized properties of microscopic particles (the so-called entanglement phenomenon), it is so simple. Because the so-called two entangled particles we see in our four-dimensional space-time may be just a projection of an entity in a higher-dimensional space in our four-dimensional space-time, that is, what we see is just an illusion. This really corresponds to what the Diamond Sutra says: Everything that has a way is like a dream bubble, like dew and electricity, and should be viewed as such. Are all around us, everything we have, including ourselves, an illusion?
If we think of us as ants in the thinking space, then creatures in the high-dimensional space (if any) can easily see our future as humans. Just as we can see what the future holds and what might happen on the way of ants crawling.
The original goal of string theory was to give a single explanation for the real world. But now, it tells us that the answer is the multiverse. String theory is still developing, but the current results seem to be a bit like the Buddhist meaning of the three thousand worlds. In Chinese, east, west, south, north and up are boundary, and the past, present and future are the world. That is, the world is synonymous with the universe. If we put aside the specific details, don't the three thousand worlds mean multiple parallel universes? As early as the fifties of the last century, the American physicist Hugh Everett proposed the theory of multiple worlds, which was once forgotten, but now physicists are beginning to pay attention to it.
The ideas of modern physics have many similarities with the ancient philosophical and religious ideas of the East. Berkeley physicist Fritjof Capra noticed this as early as 1975 (his book: The Tao of Physics became a reprint bestseller, translated in the eighties).
The Huayan Sutra says: "Buddha is born with five colored stems, one flower and one world, one leaf and one come", I wonder if Blake's poem was influenced by the Huayan Sutra. Here, the concept of holography may not be completely equivalent to the concept of holography in optics, but the most basic information is the information in the high-dimensional space, which is completely encoded in the lower one-dimensional space. This is one of the two fundamental points of the Tehoft holographic principle.
5. Scientific Paradigm and Truth
Perhaps the most amazing thing is not only the fit between Eastern mystic philosophy and religious thought and the ideas of modern physics, but why there is such a fit. Modern physics is the result of hundreds of years of efforts by countless physicists, countless complex experiments, and deep discussions.
Perhaps, the answer has long been there, and we turn a blind eye. Christ Krishnamurti said earlier that a person who meditates (or transcendental meditation, etc.) must be both an observer, a perceiver, a thinker, and a practitioner. But when we are in a meditative state, we have to forget about it, empty our minds, and focus only on meditation itself. When we look inside ourselves, we are both actors and spectators. In the language of quantum mechanics, we are both observers and observed, and we cannot be absolutely divided. But such a way obviously does not belong to the way recognized by modern science, that is, it does not belong to the paradigm of modern science.
The philosopher of science Thomas Samuel Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the sixties, proposed a paradigm theory of scientific research and revolution. Kuhn developed Popper's theory of falsification.
Kuhn's paradigm concept has had a great influence on psychology. Perhaps, the study of modern psychology is difficult to follow 100% of the traditional mathematical or chemical scientific research methods. When a psychologist hypnotizes a research subject, the hypnotized object may not be a purely objective object. If the reality or truth or wisdom obtained through meditation is difficult, it is difficult to comprehend it through words alone. Therefore, the understanding of some traditional cultures, only thinking in a literal sense, may not be accurate or correct. This corresponds to Lao Tzu's saying: Dao can be Dao, very Dao. Buddha: Don't say it, it's wrong to say it. Language, perhaps, can express at most the method of comprehending the truth, but cannot describe the truth itself. Therefore, when we see people commenting on traditional cultures (e.g., Zhuangzi, Laozi), I personally think it is important to be careful.
For this world, we have obtained so many controversial scientific theories through rigorous mathematical logic and rigorous reproducible experiments. The question is, if we self-certify the truth through meditation or similar methods, how do we know that what we have realized must be the truth? The enlightened may or may not know. Perhaps truth is essentially an illusion, and we can only be in a state of truth at most, and truth may be polymorphic as quantum mechanics says. Otherwise, there might not be so much religious strife, even within Buddhism. That's why tolerance becomes very important.