The Holographic Universe and The Logic of Place
Jeff Hoyt – Drake University
Take a look around the room you are in right now. See the furniture and artifacts and the way the room’s light source illuminates them. Feel the most immediate “solid” object. Now, imagine that nothing, not the object, the room, nor even you, none of it—is here—or, from your perspective, there—but rather at an infinitely abstracted, yet ultimately equivalent, and infinitely removed, yet intimately connected, location. Leonard Susskind, theoretical physicist and supporter of both Superstring theory and the theory of the Holographic Universe, claims just such a thing. He posits further that all those things in your room, your world, the universe, are actually holograms projected from the outer edge of space. Susskind’s 2008 book, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, while engaging, is often quite baffling. In order to unpack the dense lines of thought contained within and upon which the Holographic Universe theory is based, I will look to Nishida Kitaro’s “Logic of Place.” Using Nishida’s discussions, I hope here to provide additional terminological and theoretical means by which we might come to understand such a non-intuitive concept as a Holographic Universe.
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