An Open Mind, 055

Science consists of patterns, within patterns, within patterns. Geology is a classic example. You can take a bucket of sand from the beach, dump it upside down, drip water on it, and create miniature river channels and alluvial fans. The data from these physical models look exactly like their larger replicas in nature. It is like the physical model is a hologram of the 1 mile, the 10 mile, the 100 mile, or the 1,000 mile geologic system which occurs in nature.

Religion also consists of patterns within patterns within patterns. The creation story in Genesis can be seen as a pattern of our current scientific understanding of the creation of the universe, or of our solar system, or of the earth, or of Mesopotamia. The scriptural scripture stories and parables have multiple layers of meaning, and it is often as if each piece is telling the entire story, only with varying resolution and focus. “An Open Mind” is organized around scriptural accounts of the creation, and these holographic relationships will come out as each section is explored in more detail.

Michael Talbot wrote a very interesting book titled “The Holographic Universe,” ^2.14 which explores the brain, the cosmos, psychology, sight, time, and travel as each being a variation of a hologram. Similarly, in “An Open Mind” numerous scientific examples of how the small thing, or the small process, reflects larger things and larger processes, exactly like a small piece of a hologram represent the entire hologram. These examples range from astrophysical to biological, from physics to geology, and from scriptures to personal religious experiences.

Personal experience with the scale independence of geology and geophysics was bought into focus when I was the General Manager of The University of Houston’s Seismic Acoustics Laboratory (SAL) from January 1980 to November 1982. This research lab became a key component of the newly formed Allied Geophysical Laboratories in 1982 (http://www.agl.uh.edu/). Dr. Fred Hilterman established SAL to further explore seismic response to scaled physical models, based on work done getting his Ph.D. at Colorado School of Mines. Geologic structural and stratigraphic models were made out of Plexiglas, silicon rubber, and resins at a scale of one inch equals 1,000 feet (1”:1,000’). These models were placed in a large water tank, and piezoelectric transducers with megahertz pulses were used to simulate dynamite or vibroseis (10-100 hertz) seismic sources at normal scales. The results of these experiments were phenomenal in that the model derived seismic images looked exactly like seismic collected over oil fields with similar geology to the models. These models provide a quantifiable and repeatable way to understand reflection seismology and geological principles at a variety of scales. The results were repeatable and independent of the ego of any of the participating research scientists.

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