The Holographic Principle: a key to integrating spiritual reality and physics?

Image: Wikipedia. Two photos of the same hologram, showing that the mouse can be seen as a three-dimensional object via a two-dimensional image.

This is the first of several posts on the holographic principle. It’s an idea stemming from string theory that many physicists believe may hold the key to integrating relativity and quantum physics. The primary interest here is how, if this idea is true, it may provide a unique path to integrating a spiritual reality with our scientific understanding of the universe and ourselves in it.

This first post explores holograms, the holographic principle, and why it is such a compelling idea to many in physics and cosmology.

You’ve seen the multi-colored dove with uplifted wings on credit cards. It’s a hologram used for security. How they make a two-dimensional image appear three-dimensional and how it contributes to credit card security escapes me. And frankly, I was never curious enough to look into it.

Then someone commenting on a few of my posts kept referring to the holographic principle. I’d heard of this, a little, but again it didn’t stimulate much curiosity until Medium writer James Kowall kept bringing it up. He suggested in comments, and then in several posts, that this principle, assuming…