"Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations."
I was first really turned onto the universe-as-hologram concept by Michael Talbot's highly engaging "The Holographic Universe," a book I consider must-reading for anyone who gives a damn about what reality actually is -- or isn't.
At the end of Gregory Benford's "In the Ocean of Night," the astronaut hero experiences an epiphany (via an alien computer discovered buried on the Moon) that dissolves his sense of separateness from the Cosmos; he suddenly experiences everything as a unified Now, observed and observer forged into a single entity.
I wonder if we can achieve this without ET intervention. Really achieve it, in a way that makes us recoil in visceral horror at the way we routinely abuse ourselves and our environment. A person wholly aware of his quantum-entanglement with the universe (a universe that just happens to encapsulate his mind and body) would certainly be an improvement on the current breed.
Visionary physicist David Bohm proposed a new syntax designed to eliminate the illusion of duality. I don't foresee it becoming popular, but he was thinking in the right direction. Bohm's experimental language reminds me of William Burroughs' tireless attempts to "rub out the word." Words, after all, are artifacts, pale substitutes for reality . . .
Or are they? As a writer, or at least as someone who writes, I have a certain affinity for them. Reading a choice passage from a William Gibson novel has the ability to heighten sensory experience by juxtaposition; good writing rewires your brain, gently forces you to see the world anew, if only for a moment.
Burroughs considered Egyptian hieroglyphics a superior alternative to the written word. But even a graphical language fails to capture the quantum unity that Bohm sought. I suspect that beyond "deep structure" there is an existential lingua franca; instead of representing something else, it simply is, resolute and abiding, antedating attempts to share experience via words and images. It's the Cosmos' own source code, the white light of creation, mistakenly anthropomorphosized and deified.
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