The Holographic Universe

MOST of us think of a hologram — the little thingies on credit cards, product packaging tags, etc — as just a high tech-three-dimensional image which is very difficult to tamper with. However, there’s another extremely interesting property of holograms too: their entirety can be reconstructed from an arbitrarily small part. That is, if a hologram of a face is cut in half, each half contains all the information to make another — though smaller — image of the complete face. The same holds true even if the face is cut into a thousand pieces. In fact, a hologram is like a window with hundreds of panes; one can look at the same outside scene when it’s fully open or through any one of its panes when it’s closed. Every part of it contains all the information possessed by the whole. 
    Michael Talbot puts this in a different perspective in his book The Holographic Universe: The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram, he says, provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organisation and order. For most of its history, western science has laboured under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes. 
    Some people have used this argument to explain the curious quantum physics observation that under certain circumstances, so-called “entangled” subatomic particles which were once together at some point of time, are able to remain in intimate and instant contact with each other even if they happen to be light years apart later. The reason is not that they’re sending some sort of faster than light signals back and forth between them but because their separateness is in itself a false impression. At a fundamental level each is only an extension of everything it’s embedded or immersed in — or vice versa. 
    This leads to a startling but staring-us-in-the-face conclusion that in reality there are no pieces that make up a whole because nothing exists which is not comprehensive by itself. Parts of things — like carburettors of cars or pancreas of people — are not unfinished business. Meaning, just like the universe harbours every one, each of us harbours a universe within ourselves too.