David Bohm: The Holographic Universe

David Bohm was one of the most well respected scientists of the 20th century. He attended at the California institute of technology and UC Berkely. His Doctorate advisor was Robert Oppenheimer. Bohm was also a protege of Einstein’s, working as his assistant at Princeton University. He was one of the forerunners and pioneers of quantum theory in the mid-twentieth century.

In the early 1940’s, the US government was using much of UC Berkely’s physics research in the Manhattan Project- which would produce the worlds first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer had invited Bohm to a top secret lab called Los Amos, which helped designed the bomb, but Bohm was denied security clearance on the grounds that he had communist ties. Despite this, much of his own research was used in the development of the first atomic bomb during the Manhattan project. After the government had used Bohm’s research, they barred him from the products of his own work because of his lack of security clearance.

Helping develop the first atomic bomb was not the only major mark in his career. Bohm had made several contributions to the field of physics and the developments of new physical theories about the universe. One of those theories was that the universe itself was a hologram- which he called “the implicate and explicate order”. The implicate order was a deeper form of reality that was outside time and space, or ‘before’ it.

The implicate order to Bohm, in layman’s terms, is all the basic rules of reality that actually exist on a single plain. All events that we know of are tied to this plain of reality, but we cannot perceive how because it is hidden- or implicit. 

Bohm believed that the most basic elements of matter in the implicate order were mental, or at least mind-like. That matter was not inert and unconscious but carried with it meaning, or teleology.

“Every action starts from an intention in the implicate order. The imagination is already the creation of the form, it already has the intention and the germs of all the movements needed to carry it out. And it affects the body and so on, so that as creation takes place in a way from subtler levels of the implicate order, it goes through them until it manifests in the explicate.” – David Bohm

The explicate order was the every day world we experience in time and space. The every day objects we see and interact with, and the events that happened. All the things we know are coming ‘out of’ the implicate order as a projection or a hologram. A hologram is a flat surface with information contained in it, that can project itself as a larger image. Some people have theorized that Bohm’s theory of the Implicate order is related to Jung’s theory of synchronicity.

Bohm theorized that the implicate and explicate order interacted with each other as a greater whole- that things that appeared separate in real life were actually connected at a deeper part of reality- in the implicate order. Bohm believed that things could be manifest in reality through the mind, via the brain, which to him was a holographic machine.

This connection physicists were learning about through quantum physics.  Physicists have recently published papers that seem to confirm parts of Bohm’s theory that the universe is a hologram.

If this is the case, it changes a lot for how we think of the world. Many people think of the world as composed of separate objects that have nothing to do with each other unless they collide with one another. Bohm’s theory of the universe posits that at some level, all things are interconnected and related to one another. Many people have posited that this theory of the universe has also serve as a framework for religion and spirituality.

Extra Reading

A Holographic View of Reality by David S. Walonick, Ph.D.

Interview with Bohm

The Holographic Universe by Technewsworld

Is the Universe a Hologram? by EurekAlert!

The Universe Might Be a Giant Hologram by Huffingtonpost

Quantum Physics in a Macro World

The following excerpts are from an article in the June 2011 Scientific American magazine, titled “Living In a Quantum World,” written by physicist and Oxford professor of physics, Vlatko Vedral. All emphasis is mine.

According to standard physics textbooks, Quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world. It describes particles, atoms, and molecules but gives way to ordinary classical physics on the macroscopic scales of pears, people, and planets. Somewhere between molecules and pears lies a boundary where the strangeness of quantum behavior ends and the familiarity of classical physics begins…

[T]his convenient partitioning of the world is a myth. Few modern physicists think that classical physics has equal status with quantum mechanics; it is but a useful approximation of a world that is quantum at all scales. Although quantum effects may be harder to see in the macroworld, the reason has nothing to do with size per se but with the way that quantum systems interact with one another. Until the past decade, experimentalists had not confirmed that quantum behavior persists on a macroscopic scale. Today, however, they routinely do. These effects are more pervasive than anyone ever suspected. They may even operate in the cells of our body…

In the modern point of view, the world looks classical because the complex interactions that an object has with its surroundings conspire to conceal quantum effects from our view… Larger things tend to be more susceptible to decoherence than smaller ones, which justifies why physicists can usually get away with regarding quantum mechanics as a theory of the microworld…

[In the world of physics,] Entanglement binds together individual particles into an indivisible whole. A classical system is always divisible, at least in principle; whatever collective properties it has arises from components that themselves have certain properties. But entangled systems cannot be broken down this way. Entanglement has strange properties. Even when the entangled particles are far apart, they still behave as a single entity, leading to what Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.”

Most demonstrations of entanglement involve at most a handful of particles. Larger batches are harder to isolate from their surroundings. The particles in them are likelier to become entangled with stray particles, obscuring their original interconnections. In accordance with the language of decoherence, too much information leaks out into the environment, causing the system to behave classically….

   A neat experiment in 2003 proved that larger systems, too, can remain entangled when the leakage is reduced or somehow counteracted. Gabriel Aeppli of University College London and his colleagues took a piece of lithium fluoride salt and put it in an external magnetic field. You can think of the atoms in the salt as little spinning magnets that try to align themselves with the external field, a response known as magnetic susceptibility. Forces that the atoms exert on one another act as a kind of peer pressure to bring them into line more quickly . As the researchers varied the strength of the magnetic field, they measured how quickly the atoms became aligned. They found that they atoms responded much faster than the strength of their mutual interactions would suggest. Evidently some additional effect was helping the atoms to act in unison, and the researchers argued that entanglement was the culprit. If so, the 10²⁰ atoms of the salt form a hugely entangled state.

To avoid confounding the effects of the random motions associated with heat energy, Aeppli’s team did its experiments at extremely low temperatures- a few millikelvins. Since then, however, Alexandre Martins de Souza of the Brazilian Center for Physics research in Rio de Janeiro and his colleagues have discovered macroscopic entanglement in materials such as copper carboxylate at room temperature and higher. In these systems, the interaction among particles spins is strong enough to resist thermal chaos… Physicists have seen entanglement in systems of increasing size and temperature, from ions trapped by electromagnetic fields to ultra-cold atoms in lattices to superconducting quantum bits…

Other experiments scale up this basic idea, so that huge numbers of atoms become entangled and enter states that classical physics would deem impossible. And if solids can be entangled when they are large and warm, it takes only a small leap of imagination to ask whether the same might be true of a very special kind of large, warm system: life…

People have long wondered whether birds and other animals might have some built-in compass. In the 1970’s the husband wife team of Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko of the University of Frankfurt in Germany caught robins that had been migrating to Africa and put them in artificial magnetic fields. Oddly, the robins, they found, were oblivious to the reversal of the magnetic field direction, indicating that they could not tell north from south. The birds did, however, respond to the inclination of the earth’s magnetic field- that is, the angle that the field lines make with the surface. That is all they need to navigate. Interestingly, blindfolded robins did not respond to a magnetic field at all, indicating that they somehow sense the field with their eyes.

In 2000 Thorsten Ritz, a physicist then at the University of Southern Florida who has a passion for migratory birds, and his colleagues proposed that entanglement is the key. In their Scenario, which builds on the previous work of Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois, a bird’s eye has a type of molecule in which two electrons form an entangled pair with zero total spin. Such a situation simply cannot be mimicked with classical physics. When this molecule absorbs visible light, the electrons get enough energy to separate and become susceptible to external influences, including the earths magnetic field. If the magnetic field is inclined, it affects the two electrons differently, creating an imbalance that changes the chemical reaction that the molecule undergoes. Chemical pathways in the eye translate this difference into neurological impulses, ultimately creating an image of the magnetic field in the bird’s brain…

Another biological process where entanglement may operate is photosynthesis, the process whereby plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. Incident light ejects electrons inside plant cells, and these electrons all need to find their way to the same place: the chemical reaction center where they can deposit their energy and set off the reactions that fuel plant cells. Classical physics fails to explain the near-perfect efficiency with which they do so…

The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental. It is just a question of experimental ingenuity, and few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale. If anything, the general belief is that if a deeper theory ever supersedes quantum physics, it will show the world to be even more counterintuitive that anything we have so far…