As I sit here to write, ideas pop in and out of my conscious thought. As I sit here and contemplate, the light bulb goes off in my mind, projecting mental images into my head. The nature of reality is quite intriguing. There are so many avenues and rabbit holes to travel down that one soon becomes lost in ideas and explanations for why things exist the way they do. The philosopher sits in deep thought and asks himself, how did we get here? How did everything come into existence? “Please bring light to my troubled thoughts,” he says to himself. No sooner does he have an epiphany, an aha moment in time, and so begins the story of light, quantum entanglement, and three-dimensional objects.
Light is carried throughout the universe by photons, the quanta of the electromagnetic field. Photons carry both energy and information from one place to another. When light interacts with matter and quantum fields, it can transfer energy and change the state of those systems. In quantum field theory, particles are understood as excitations of underlying fields. What we perceive as matter—the particles and atoms that make up the physical world—emerges from these fundamental fields and their interactions.
Just like the light bulb going off in your head leads to ideas and pictures in your mind, light provides a way for information to be transferred and physical systems to interact throughout the universe.
The holographic principle takes this idea in an even more fascinating direction. When studying black holes, physicists discovered that the entropy associated with a black hole is proportional to the area of its event horizon rather than the volume enclosed within it. The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy is expressed as:
[
S_{BH}=\frac{k_B c^3 A}{4G\hbar}
]
where:
(S_{BH}) = black-hole entropy
(A) = area of the event horizon
(k_B) = Boltzmann’s constant
(G) = Newton’s gravitational constant
(\hbar) = reduced Planck constant
(c) = speed of light
This remarkable relationship suggests that the maximum amount of information that can be associated with a region of space may scale with its boundary area rather than its volume. From this insight came the holographic principle: the physics within a volume may, in certain theoretical descriptions, be completely encoded by information living on a lower-dimensional boundary.
At the smallest scales of known physics, this raises a profound question: could the three-dimensional universe we experience be an emergent description of information encoded in fewer dimensions?
The analogy to a hologram is difficult to ignore. A conventional hologram stores information on a two-dimensional surface, yet when illuminated correctly, that information produces the appearance of a three-dimensional image. The physical holographic principle is not literally saying that the universe is a photographic hologram or that ordinary light projects our universe from a two-dimensional plate. Rather, it suggests something much deeper: a theory describing physics in a higher-dimensional volume can, in certain circumstances, contain an equivalent description in terms of information living on a lower-dimensional boundary.
The boundary, therefore, may contain information capable of describing the geometry and physical processes occurring within the bulk.
This brings us to quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement describes a relationship between quantum systems in which their joint state cannot be completely described by treating each system independently. Einstein famously referred to the phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” Two entangled quantum systems can exhibit correlations that remain even when the systems are separated by enormous distances.
It is important, however, to distinguish entanglement from the idea that two particles are simply communicating instantaneously. Quantum entanglement produces correlations, but it does not allow information to be transmitted faster than light.
Still, entanglement may be much more important to the structure of reality than simply being a strange feature of quantum mechanics.
In certain approaches to quantum gravity and holography, physicists have found deep connections between quantum entanglement and the geometry of spacetime itself. This leads to a fascinating possibility: perhaps entanglement is not merely something that happens within spacetime. Perhaps, at a more fundamental level, relationships between quantum degrees of freedom help give rise to the structure of spacetime.
Imagine a blanket woven together from countless individual threads. Each thread is connected to others, and those connections give the blanket its overall structure. Remove or sever enough of those connections, and the structure of the blanket begins to change.
Perhaps spacetime can be thought of in a similar conceptual way.
Quantum degrees of freedom may be woven together through entanglement, creating relationships from which the smooth geometry of spacetime emerges. In this picture, the geometry we experience as three-dimensional space would not necessarily be fundamental. It could be an emergent structure arising from a deeper network of quantum information.
Now the three ideas begin to converge.
Light represents a fundamental carrier of energy and information. Quantum fields provide the underlying framework in which particles and matter arise. The holographic principle suggests that information describing a region of space may be encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary. Quantum entanglement provides relationships between quantum degrees of freedom, and modern theoretical physics has shown that these relationships may be intimately connected to the emergence of spacetime geometry.
Light, information, holography, and entanglement therefore become pieces of the same enormous puzzle.
But perhaps the most fascinating question is not whether light literally projects a three-dimensional universe from a two-dimensional surface. The deeper question is whether the reality we experience as three-dimensional space is itself an emergent manifestation of something more fundamental.
Could the universe, at its deepest level, be less like a collection of objects sitting inside space and more like an interconnected network of information and relationships from which space, time, matter, and geometry emerge?
Perhaps the universe is not simply a stage upon which reality happens.
Perhaps the stage itself is part of the phenomenon we are trying to understand.
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