might concern itself with the princess, with the next line on Princess Leia
appearing on page 8,417,363.
The Blind Holographer
I don’t know about you, but this makes me doubt the holographic expla-
nation. I’m not comfortable with the idea that the instructions for mak-
ing yours truly are scattered all over hell and gone; I’d be a lot more
comfortable if they were close together, like me. There is a hole in this
argument, though: the theorem from topology that states that any trans-
formation between objects of different dimensions must be discontinu-
ous relies on the fact that the objects are continua of higher dimensions,
characterized by the real numbers. The universe is quantized, the ele-
ments in it discrete, and this would also be true of the boundary of the
universe (I think). In this case, my objections might not be valid, but I’ve
never seen a theorem from topology addressing this point.
Another reason that casts doubt, at least for me, upon the universe-
as-hologram theory is an updated version of the watchmaker theory es-
poused by the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley. Paley argued
that just as a watch is too complicated a contrivance to simply occur natu-
rally and the existence of a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker,
so do the complexity of living things imply the existence of a creator. In
his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker,^13 Richard Dawkins argued that
natural selection plays the role of blind watchmaker, without purpose or
forethought, but directing the evolution of living things.
The updated version of Paley’s argument would be that the existence of
a hologram (the universe) implies the existence of a holographer outside
the universe. Just as a character in a novel cannot write the novel in
which he is a character, a character in a hologram cannot create the holo-
gram. So where does the hologram come from, and where do the rules
come from that govern how the hologram is played? Maybe it’s like a self-
extracting file on a computer. I confess that my knowledge of the physics
behind this theory is nonexistent, but nonetheless it seems to me that the
universe-as-hologram theory requires either a blind holographer, a con-
cept that is to this theory what natural selection is to evolution, or the ex-
istence of a holographer outside the universe. Possibly the blind
holographer will prove to be as much of a bombshell for physics as natu-
ral selection was to evolutionary biology.
The Raw Materials 199