by Bob_stew » Wed May 09, 2007 2:04 am
For this purpose, I define "hologram" not as the image which appears if you direct light at a plate with holographic properties, but as the plate itself.
I read the article, and it intrigued me enough to make me check the wikipedia article about holography. The author of "The universe as a hologram seems to have misunderstood (or deliberately chosen to oversimplify) what happens when one cuts off a piece of a hologram.
Each part of a hologram doesn't, according to the wiki article, contain all the information possessed by the whole. Actually, it almost should go without saying, seeing as it seems highly unlikely that one atom can contain all the information possessed by the original hologram. Rather, what you lose when cutting off a piece of a hologram is the possibility to look at the object (in the hologram) from all angles. The smaller the piece, the smaller the angle available. Like looking through a window at an object. One has the possibility to go *closer to the window* to see more of the object (and if the window is big enough/placed far enough away, you'll be able to see the whole object), though the point of view is still restricted to a small area.
It does make sense to me, though, that *if* the universe is holographic in nature, and our physical bodies are part of it, we can only sense the world from highly limited points of view through our physical senses. As if our consciousness, or the "source" of it, looks through part of the hologram.
Very interesting, but, uh.. some sentences, like "what we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want", feel like huge, illogical jumps in conclusion.