This is a stereo image and it shows the interior of the cluster in 3D. Stare through the images with your eyes focused at a distant point and the two images will turn into three images and the center image will appear in 3D.

I can't quite get my eyes to focus that far apart. I can only get them to go about 80% of the way. If the picture were about 20%-25% smaller, I think I could do it. Do you have reduced size images avalable?

When I finally get three images, they all look 3-D to me.

Ah, but are you certain of this claim? I think that it is likely true of the way you are using the word 'order', but it appears to me that people who study thermodynamics have a specific, perhaps slightly different, concept of 'order' which is supposedly quantifiable in an absolute sense, and as non-subjective as mass and energy.



Cool, its nice to have the assertion stated clearly. This is much cleaner than my multi-line explanations. Maybe one day I'll look this up and post references about thermodynamic concepts of order.

Yep, I jumped in as the first poster, ready to direct attention to potential 'blurring of the lines'. I appreciate and respect the wisdom/intelligence/flexibility with which everyone here has treated the subject matter.




I could be wrong, but I thought that he was saying that apparent motion is not something actually moving through space, but a ripple in the 'underlying reality' being propagated along.

You know, I can setup ten alarm clocks in a row, that go off in sequence, giving an apparent 'movement' to the sound - but its actually a phase wave of independent events; that sort of thing. Maybe.



Cool. Reality is what it is, most of what we think we perceive we actually project; models which emphasize interconnectedness may be better for the human spirit than models which emphasize separateness. I hope most people realize that most gurus are not scientists, and they are no going to gurus for scientific information. So when guru-type people make claims about 'the true nature of reality', and base it on scripture or their personal realizations, I tend to ask myself "Will this claim have a positive influence the listener?" rather than "Is this good science?" Its when people claim that there is scientific research 'backing' a particular position that I will measure their claims against higher standards of evidence and rationality.

Wow, i already have computer related eyestrain... now they really hurt. I finally saw it, though, I think... looked like large spheres in a crystal lattice arrangement, and each sphere had an texture map on it which implied some kind of semi-fractal packing of spheres within spheres.

From http://www.panspermia.org/seconlaw.htm

So as best I can tell, “order” is arbitrary even in the thermodynamic sense. That is, just like pattern recognition software, it is dependent on arbitrarily selected parameters.

But I could be wrong.

Actually spiritualists and some gurus have been way ahead of science for a long time in some areas. When science does catch up to them, you will hear them say "That's what I've been telling you for years.."

But you are right, what they know is definitely "not science" as you define "science" anyway.

Because science does not recognize that there are ways of "knowing" things that do not conform to their methods of observation.

That sounds like something he would say and it certainly makes sense given the non-existence of time and space in the 'underlying reality.'

But for us, on this side (the unfolded order) we define movement as a relative thing having to do with objects positions in relation to each other.

Movement or motion is relative.

Example: My car looks like it is moving when I look at the car next to me. In truth, I was stopped and the car next to me was moving.

Or: I thought the car next to me was moving forward against a red light but in truth my car was rolling backwards.

I admit that I did not read all the posts here, but have you read Karl Pilbram's the holograhpic mind? It is a good example and highly thought of in the field of neuroscience.

I have not read that book, but would like to.

Hey, thats a good point, JB. I've read books that clearly use the word 'science' to refer to any system of knowledge and/or investigation, regardless of whether claims are verifiable, falsifiable, based on measurement, unrelated to the material reality, etc.

Some of those books will have a place in the book where they define or explain the way they are using their terms, and they often do so honestly. I really respect that. Those books were not trying to 'ride the coat-tails' (of the esteem/respect many give) materialistic science by playing a shell game with words - they were simply, openly, using the word 'science' in a particular way.

--------------------------------------------------

Sky, thanks for the link! I tend to read everything with a high degree of skepticism, and through that filter there was no significant new 'information' for me there (on this question); I'm familiar with many of the claims made, lines of thinking presented. It does echo skepticism that I have of the opposite claim. I regret that I cannot, at this time, contribute meaningfully to discussion.

Your use of the term "skeptical" made me start wondering what would be it's opposite.

So I looked it up and had a small epiphany: I tend more towards belief than disbelief. That is, given a situation with no evidence or proof, there is no objective reason to either believe or disbelieve. So I pick “believe” just because that’s what I want – which really just says that the only reason available is necessarily a subjective one.

I guess that’s more related to the “Evidence of a designer thread” than this one. But it came up here so this is where I’m posting it.

But in any case, thanks for bringing it up because, however irrelevant it may be to anything else, it gave me the impetus to investigate in a direction I had never investigated before.

Sky, Thanks for sharing that! I would like to clarify, that most of the time, when I speak of skepticism, I speak of 'non-belief', NOT 'disbelief'. As much as possible, I seek to choose 'non-belief' (in the absence of evidence).

CONCERNING BELIEF AND DISBELIEF:

I have tried to avoid blatant "disbelief" in anything strait away. I tend to evaluate the information,---> but not in the way a scientist would, looking for 'proof.'

I like to maintain a very open mind simply because I suspect that the truth is often stranger than fiction, so I don't jump to conclusions at something that seems ridiculous or unbelievable. I ask the question... what if this is true....?

To give an example, what if Big Foot really does exist?

Then, I examine all the information having anything to do with "Big foot" (or any other strange creature people have claimed to see on a regular basis..) and extrapolate HOW this could be possible and WHY he is so elusive or why this has not been confirmed. I work with the premise that this is true, and people have seen this creature, rather than starting with calling them liars or nuts or frauds.

I respect people enough to believe that they believe what they are saying, and that they did see something.

So I am on the line between disbelief and belief. I don't disbelieve, and I don't believe.

I.E.: you wouldn't want to go hunting for aliens or vampires or big foot unless you had a lot of information about them and how to defeat them in the event you did find them and get in a battle with them.

Learn as much as possible from every source possible.

HUNTING FOR BIGFOOT:

1. So if I were going hunting for Big Foot, from what I have learned and from what I have extrapolated, (guessed) - if this creature DOES exist, you will not be able to shoot one with a normal hunting rifle and cause much damage if what I suspect about them is true.

2. The best place to look for Big Foot is in an area where other strange sightings like UFO's, cattle mutilations, abductions, etc have been reported because all of this phenomenon is related. Big Foot is not a regular physical animal or creature.

All of this from someone who neither believes or disbelieves in Big Foot. Given that, I'm not interested in finding him any more than I am interested in finding UFO's or Aliens.

Got it. Thanks for clarifying. Now I understand better.

Well, I got the course on Black Holes. I must confess that I'm a tad bit disappointed. The only lecture that contains anything at all about holographic effects is indeed lecture 11, and it's quite sketchy and unconvincing.

I was right that it would be a quantum effect. The so-called "hologram" that a Black Hole supposedly produces does not even qualify as a 'hologram' in my own personal opinion.

In fact, Dr. Filippenko himself even question whether or not this 'hologram' actually exists in any 'absolute' sense. Of course that's a good question to ask about anything. But he's asking this with respect to the observers viewpoints. The holograph exists for us (being outside of the black hole), but it wouldn't exist from the vantage point of any observers who might have actually fallen into the black hole. So it's a "reality" that is totally dependent on the state of the observer.

But then this has always been the stance of Einstein's Relativity. Just the same, the point being that there is no 'mechanism' that produces this so-called hologram other than the viewpoints of observers!

Owl bet Sky will love that conclusion!

In other words, there's no need for a 'holographic projector' beyond that of the observer. The observer is the projector through the mere act of having a viewpoint. The viewpoint is what causes the 'illusion'.

There is more too this, but unfortunately he didn't really go into the depth I was hoping for. He spent a lot of time talking about quantum information and entropy which stole much of the show away from the holographic issues.

There's a whole lot to be said about quantum information and entropy. I won't even attempt to address those issues in this post other than to say that "quantum information" is not the same as we intuitively think of information. In other words consider the very word; "information". This word represents specific information to us, (i.e. the very meaning of the word itself). However, in a quantum context if we take the letters of the word "information" and re-arrange them as say, "tfinonramoi", from an intuitive point of view "information" has been lost. It's no longer "information" it has now become "tfinonramoi" which is a meaningless string of letters that holds no "information" from our way of thinking.

However, from a quantum point of view both "information" and "tfinonramoi" represent the same "information", just rearranged. So when speaking of quantum "information" things get a bit strange indeed. Quantum information does not car about the macro world. The meaning of words is meaningless to the quantum world. All the quantum world is concerned with is whether or not the same "content" is still there.

So, anyway, that's an aside, but it throws a huge wrench in the whole idea of what is meant by 'information" in terms of black holes. If you fall into a black hole, and over time the black hole evaporates into nothing more than mundane radiation, that radiation is considered to contain the information of your original body! But clearly it does not contain the information of the macro structure of your body.

So the very meaning of "information" at the quantum level takes on a whole different meaning from what you and I think of as "information".

Getting back to the Holograms

Even if we accept that black holes "produce" holograms, they only produce extremely thin 2-dimensional holograms. However, if we now consider the universe as being inside a black hole, then we can view the outside 'boundary" as this 2-dimentional holographic image. Then we can imagine that image being projected inward to produce a 3-dimentional universe inside the black hole.

This may seem utterly esoteric and without any serious physics to support it, but there are reasons to consider it as being plausible. Unfortunately that's about all he said about that.

Like I say, it was a rather disappointing lecture (just lecture 11). The rest of the course is pretty normal information about black holes. Quite interesting but unfortunately for me, not much that I personally didn't already know about them. So I confess that I was hoping for more details on this holographic aspect of black holes.

The funny thing that kind of surprised me was that at the end of the lecture Filippenko suggested that we can all hope that we're more than just a holographic projection. But why? We are what we are no matter how the illusion is conducted. The physical reality of the universe is not going to change a thing about our ultimate essence. Whether we turn out to be strings vibrating, or photons interfering with each other truly isn't going to make much difference in the end. We are either "more" than the either of those things, or we are "merely" either of those things. In either case, the physics is truly irrelevant.

So, anyway, I wouldn't recommend buying this just for the hologram lecture. If you're interested in black holes overall, it might be ok. Filippenko took a very relaxed approach to these particular lectures and assumed a layman audience. So they basically have the flavor of him explaining this stuff to his next door neighbor. Some of this other lectures were done with a slightly more professional atmosphere. Although Filippenko is quite an emotional and passionate lecturer. He's really into physics and astronomy with a passion.

YES YES YOU HAVE FIGURED IT OUT!

Congratulations!!!




Yes you are onto something here too.

Now consider this. A hologram in this world is projected from a very thin two dimensional sheet of film. The hologram image itself is three dimensional.

But a holographic image that we produce is "just a reflection of light." right?

Well guess what? So are YOU.

Our bodies are made up of atoms. Atoms are mostly empty space. There really is nothing "solid." Everything is just vibration and light.

Light itself is vibration. Sound is Vibration.

This is a universe of light and sound. It is a reflection of light and a projection.

Oh man I'm gettin' wood here!