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The Universe is a hologram: Stephen Hawking's final theory, explained by his closest collaborator
https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/steph...nal-theory

EXCERPT: . . . Hawking’s final theory of the Big Bang provides a bold and surprising answer. It envisages the Universe as a holographic projection.

In a familiar hologram, a third dimension of space emerges from the lines and scribbles on a screen. In the cosmos-as-hologram idea, which has become the talk of the town among theoretical physicists, it is the dimension of time that can be holographically encoded.

Stephen liked to visualise this idea in a disk-like image of the kind shown above. The outer circle depicts a timeless hologram consisting of countless entangled qubits.

The disk shows the evolution of an expanding Universe that projects down from this. The origin of the Universe lies at the centre of the disk and it expands outward in the radial direction.

It is as if there is a code operating on the entangled qubits that brings about the Universe and this is what we perceive as the flow of time.

Crucially, by taking a fuzzier view of the hologram, one ventures farther back in time, toward the interior of the disk. It is like zooming out. Eventually, however, one runs out of bits. This is the origin of time, according to our theory.

There can be nothing before the Big Bang, because the past that holographically emerges doesn’t extend further back.

These insights yield a new twist on the riddle of cosmic design. The early Hawking sought to describe the origin of the Universe as a quantum creation event... (MORE - missing details)

Ok..I've been ruminating on this for a few days now and I think I can articulate it now. It is a metaphorical depiction of physical reality.

We live inside a boundless and many tiered animated hologram made of light and mass. Our bodies and even our brains are part of that hologram, paradoxically seeming to be located inside of and cosubstantial with the very world that is being generated.

We see and touch and move things and interact with them as parts of the animated hologram. We are after all but 3 D light/mass cartoon characters. But none of this is real. It is all happening as merely changes in the hologram world. It is being instantaneously generated from some unknown noumenal source--some inconceivable image-rendering hardware transcending the hologram world. But there is nothing else that the hologram is a simulation of. So the hologram and what happens in it is indistinguishable from an absolute and closed substantial reality, only seeming to be real but in fact only being a generated animated hologram made up of light and mass.

But even so, every part of the hologram, thruout its holographic spacetime, everything that happens within it, down to the smallest glowing 3d pixels of lightmass, is directly connected to the generating unknown source. At every point of the hologram the data creating the whole hologram is available. It is the timeless and spaceless immediacy of the noumenal animator generating and directing the whole hologram animation from the inside and all at once. It's how everything in the hologram is really connected.

Just found these quotes/descriptions by David Bohm. His ideas align remarkably well with my metaphor:

"In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders" (Bohm 1980, p. xv).

"...Bohm employed the hologram as a means of characterising implicate order, noting that each region of a photographic plate in which a hologram is observable contains within it the whole three-dimensional image, which can be viewed from a range of perspectives. That is, each region contains a whole and undivided image. In Bohm's words:

There is the germ of a new notion of order here. This order is not to be understood solely in terms of a regular arrangement of objects (e.g., in rows) or as a regular arrangement of events (e.g., in a series). Rather, a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. Now, the word 'implicit' is based on the verb 'to implicate'. This means 'to fold inward' ... so we may be led to explore the notion that in some sense each region contains a total structure 'enfolded' within it".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_...20perceive.