I just finished reading The Holographic Universe because it sounded like it had some neat ideas in it. Overall it did indeed have some interesting ideas, but the support of those ideas throguh much of hte book was very weak.
The basic premise is that there is a theory in physics that explains everything as being an interaction of wave fronts that creat the hologram that we see as reality. There is another holographic theory of mind that is in psychology where a part contains the information of the whole as well, as evidenced by removing part of the brain not destroying the knowledge of how to do something. Memories and other brain functions are not all local to specific portions of the brain.
Now take those and draw links between them and use that to try and explain psychic phenomenon. I’m not saying this isn’t the way things really are or not because there certainly are things out there that aren’t explained by current theories and things that people don’t want to try to address because they are too far out there. I’m glad people are working to try and explain these things even if they are considered the outside fringe of science.
The problem with this book is the support for many claims are anecdotal tales from the author or his friends. The other weakness in the support is in jumping to conclusions. After spending considerable time explaining how people have been shown to be able to manipulate physical phenomenon like which holes balls will fall in statistically vs no concentration, he uses a completely different explanation for how the contents of a tape got changed when experimental subjects were supposed to focus on changing it. The explanation? They changed the past! It’s going to be a lot easier to change a tape than to change a computer generated tape made some time in the past.
The other example was in his explanation that subjects predicted the future by guessing what picture would be shown the next day. This was after a lengthy description on how mind reading and telepathic communication can be explained by this theory. It’s more likely that the subjects were influencing the choices of picture made by the researcher.
If the author had stuck to a the few areas where his points do seem to hold up instead of trying to stretch it to fit any reported oddness that happens his case and book would have been much stronger.
I’d say to avoid this book.
