THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE

A veteran reporter on the New Age scene (Beyond the Quantum, 1986) ably explains the latest hip paradigm before soaring off into hyperdimensional inner space. Our world and its contents, suggests Talbot, are ``only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.'' Behind the breathy prose, he's talking about the universe as a hologram; this is, as a three-dimensional representation of a higher reality. Two men fathered this theory: Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist who claims that the brain functions holographically; and physicist David Bohm, who took the ball from Pribram and carried it right through the goal posts, describing the cosmos as a ``holomovement,'' the ``explicate'' projection of an ``implicate'' reality. This implies, says Talbot, that the ``objective universe...might not even exist.'' So far so good, if a bit gooey. But Talbot then goes on a pixilated hologram hunt, unearthing evidence for the new paradigm in telepathy, schizophrenia, synchronicity, the placebo effect, stigmata, acupuncture, psychokinesis, poltergeists, precognition, UFOs, psychic archaeology-and more. Without exception, the author takes a naive approach to these phenomena (for instance, near-death experiencers are ``actually making visits to an entirely different level of reality''), evincing a sort of naive New Age Boy Scout eagerness that reaches its zenith when he talks about his own psychic adventures, like watching a ``small brown object'' materialize in his office. Fifty sold pages-then like, far out, man.