“Let us not forget that we do not actually live in the world of microparticles. We are their product.” – Florin Gaiseanu Might reality actually be one-dimensional cosmic strings vibrating in ten dimensions on the two-dimensional boundary surface of the universe and projecting as a hologram the entire volume of spacetime – all two trillion galaxies? Might consciousness manifest as a unified four-dimensional spacetime field, with “place cells” contouring a four-dimensional cognitive map in the brain? Might the human spirit itself wake up from our biological dreaming to our creative legacy, which connects the new reality of the holographic universe with our gut bacteria producing neurotransmitters that influence choices before the quantum gates, where body meets Psyche in memories, microfeels, dreams, fantasies, and media images perceived as real? Might mystery appear as a shiny crow turning its head to present the sequin of one eye so near in its watching that a ray of darkness penetrates the distance we imagine between us?

Did you know that black holes are expanding at the speed of light? Every point on the spherical surface of a black hole is a ray of light suspended, motionless, because the boundary, the event horizon, is already moving outward at the speed of light. Gravity and the curvature of spacetime keep it from expanding. Have you heard of particles that have zero energy? When a particle of energy crosses the event horizon of a black hole, the mass falls in and the momentum stays behind as a zero-energy particle, like a photon, which is a particle that has no rest mass and plenty of momentum. But this kind of photon is special, because it’s located on the surface of a black hole. Energy is inversely proportional to wavelength; so, zero-energy particles have an infinite wavelength, big as the entire universe. These zero-energy particles on the black hole’s surface extend all the way to the boundary of the cosmos. And that’s how news about the particles that fell into a black hole reaches the edge of the universe and escapes destruction. The process is called supertranslation. It’s science fiction, invented by theoretical physicists whose hearts are broken by the idea that reality may not be deterministic, that information could be lost, that the laws of physics are not really laws. It’s like the metaphysics of night, where the underside of dreams connects us to the furthest reaches of the psyche with secret news of our day. Or it’s like animal souls, something holy on the far side of the human world. You know, stuff that can never be directly relevant for describing the real world but that promises a meaning spread over the whole universe.

Is evil the displacement of good? And is flesh the madness of matter? I mean, consider the orderliness of the periodic table. Elements display exquisitely precise properties, combining with unerring predictability into molecules. But then, what happens when atoms arrange into flesh? They dream. Why should atoms dream? Why should an arrangement of atoms color silence with thoughts? What do atoms know of gladness? Or the infinite sky above us? These are atoms writing this. And the atoms reading this know as much as I about time and brevity, love and destiny, and the good that measures evil.

What we know about light we’ve known for over a hundred years: At the speed of light, time stops, space contracts to nothing. For light, reality is instantaneous. From our latest understanding of the very beginning of the universe – at the Big Bang – everything existed as pure light in a point a trillion times smaller than an atom. Over 13.8 billion years, the fermions (matter) of the universe self-organized into conscious entities, including you and me sharing these thoughts. The physicist Klee Irwin (http://www.quantumgravityresearch.org/klee-irwin) points out that there are no laws of physics prohibiting bosons (light) from also self-organizing. If bosons did in fact self-organize into consciousness, they would have done so instantaneously (since time does not exist for light). At the initial instant of creation, light became conscious. The first moment of the Big Bang was so infinitesimally small, it existed as a quantum event. That means that, at the start, the universe contained all its possible quantum states, all the possible universes that could condense from that energetic instant. At the very beginning, light became conscious of every moment that would ever exist in every point of spacetime in all possible universes. What does such omnipresent, omniscient consciousness sound like to you?

Why haven’t we detected other technological civilizations out among the two trillion galaxies of the observable universe? We seem to be alone. But what if we’re wrong to assume that advanced technologies in other planetary systems create superstructures? What if truly sophisticated engineering doesn’t expand but shrinks civilization? The applied science capable of harnessing ever larger amounts of energy could also construct ever more complex structures in smaller spaces. Why go small?  Because self-organizing species eventually translate biological selves into digital identities. When the sentience of a species transcends biology, it can occupy virtual reality in nanosize computational grids. Digitized information of entire worlds will continue to flourish and evolve in a microscopic space of cybernetic architecture. A civilization of high energy technology that has inscribed its sentience in configuration space will continue to manipulate the material reality of spacetime and will extend its influence across the entire universe through an astonishing paradox. As nanosizing civilization grows smaller, it acquires the energy to access super tiny, naturally occurring spacetime tunnels called wormholes. Wormholes have recently been identified in quantum physics with entanglement, the strange property exhibited when particles and pieces of space that have been in contact continue to influence one another no matter how far they move apart. Regions of spacetime once very close in the early universe continue to affect each other instantly across billions of light years, because the geometry of spacetime emerges from the quantum entanglement of tiny, ubiquitous wormholes. The high energy technology of a nanosize civilization could use these fundamental wormholes of cosmic entanglement to expand across our holographic universe. Such a civilization could disseminate self-assembly units through this universal network of wormholes. And though their culture would remain too small for us to see and would broadcast no signals (other than what propagates through micro-wormholes), they could be everywhere, fully present here and in the most distant parts of the universe. All of spacetime around us right now could be thriving with a profoundly advanced technological civilization too small for us to see!