Tribute to H. John Caulfield Hijacking of the 'Holographic Principle' by cosmologists

摘要

I came to know Caulfield as a graduate student while developing suitable techniques to quantitatively evaluate coherence properties of pulsed Ruby and YAG lasers beams during the first decade of their evolutions. We continued our professional acquaintance till 2011 through various yearly conferences. It was at the 2011, 4th biennial conference on, "The nature of light: What are photons?" Caulfield gave a paper on this topic and privately expressed his deep concern that the optical "Holographic Principle" has been hijacked by the cosmologists based upon insufficient understanding of the physical processes behind generation and reconstruction of optical holograms. Unlike our material universe, holographic images do not exist as touchable objects; but the material universe does. Now, in his absence, I have taken the liberty of presenting his views about the holographic principle and extend that to further challenge the prevailing hypothesis that cosmological red shift is purely optical Doppler shift that has led to the postulate that the current universe is expanding rapidly. Rigorously speaking, the core problem is generated when we assign reality to human interpreted information out of experimentally derived data, which can never capture complete behavioral properties of any cosmological object that we try to characterize. In holography, an object is a touch-able reality. Scattered light from an object brings incomplete, but sufficient information about the object to construct a decent hologram. It records phase and amplitude information indirectly as intensity fringes. Further, the reconstructed IMAGE does not represent the original touch-able reality. Besides, the image is further degraded from the insufficient information originally recorded on the hologram. Physical theories should be based upon our need to map physical processes behind the phenomenon under study. Information is a subjective human interpretation of measurable parameters registered by instruments, whose registration fidelities are always less than 100%. We illustrate this point by further criticizing the postulate of "Expanding Universe" by analyzing optical Doppler shift as a function of the two velocities, those of source-atoms and those of detector-atoms, in the coronas of stars in different galaxies with respect to the stationary space, instead of just the relative velocities between all possible pairs of galaxies.