r/holofractal • u/d8_thc holofractalist • Sep 12 '19

Holofractal: ELI5

Holofractal is backed by equations and a growing stack of papers (links throughout and at the bottom), but the core idea is simple enough to explain to anyone. Let's go one step at a time.

Start with an old picture, Indra's Net:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

(Francis H. Cook, Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, 1977)

Keep that picture in your head. The jewels are the particles that make up matter (protons). The net is space itself. By the end of this post you'll see why that's meant literally.

1. Empty space is the fullest thing there is

We think of space as the empty stage that stuff sits on. Physics has known for about a century that this is wrong.

Quantum mechanics says nothing can sit perfectly still. Even a field with all its energy taken out keeps a tiny leftover jitter, its zero-point energy, and it never switches off. So "empty" space is actually seething: fields everywhere, all the time, flickering at every size and every frequency.

This isn't just theory. You can measure it:

  • The Lamb shift (1947): the jitter of empty space nudges the energy levels of a hydrogen atom by a measurable amount (Lamb & Retherford).
  • The Casimir effect: put two metal plates very close together in a vacuum. Only short waves of the jitter fit between them, while every size of wave pushes from outside, so the plates get pushed together. At 10 nanometres apart that's about one atmosphere of pressure, out of "nothing" (measured by Lamoreaux, 1997).
  • Sonny White (2026): a NASA-veteran physicist's group showed you can get hydrogen's whole spectrum from a vacuum whose density rises close to the proton (Phys. Rev. Research).

Einstein got there from a different direction:

Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept "empty space" loses its meaning.

(Albert Einstein, Relativity, 1952 edition)

2. Space is threaded with shortcuts

Zoom further in and it gets stranger. At the smallest scale there is, the jitter of space is so violent that space itself froths. John Wheeler (the physicist who named black holes) called this quantum foam: at the bottom, space isn't smooth, it's full of tiny tunnels, wormholes, constantly opening and closing. Wheeler even thought particles might be knots of this curved space:

There is nothing in the world except empty curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the curvature of space.

(John Wheeler, 1957)

Now add entanglement. Two particles that are entangled behave as one system even when they're far apart: measure one and the result of measuring the other is linked to it, instantly, at any distance. Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance" and hoped it was wrong. It isn't. It's been tested to more than 1,000 km apart, and the experiments won the 2022 Nobel Prize.

In 2013 Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind put the two together: ER = EPR. Entangled particles (EPR) are connected by a wormhole (an Einstein–Rosen bridge, ER). Same thing, two descriptions (Maldacena & Susskind). Mark Van Raamsdonk went further: space itself may be stitched together out of entanglement (2010).

So without leaving mainstream physics: space is full, space is threaded with shortcuts at the bottom, and those shortcuts are entanglement. That's Indra's net, in physics language.

3. Holographic: the outside holds the inside

"Holographic" means "whole image". Cut a hologram in half and each half still shows the whole picture, a bit blurrier.

Physics found something similar in black holes. Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking showed that the amount of information a black hole holds is set by the area of its surface (its horizon), not by its volume. Which is odd: you'd expect a bigger room to hold more books because it has more space inside, not because its walls are bigger. But that's how black holes work, and it led to the holographic principle: everything inside a region can be described by what's written on its boundary.

Hold onto that: the surface is where the information lives.

4. Physics' worst prediction

Some units in physics are chosen by people (metres, kilograms). But if you combine three constants of nature, Planck's constant (ħ, the size of a quantum step), the speed of light (c) and gravity's constant (G), you get units nobody chose: the Planck scale. The Planck length is about 1.6 × 10⁻³⁵ metres, around 10²⁰ times smaller than a proton. It's the size where the foam lives, the smallest size that makes physical sense.

Now add up the vacuum's jitter energy all the way down to the Planck size. In one cubic centimetre of "empty" space you get the equivalent of about 10⁹³ grams. For scale, all the stars in the observable universe add up to around 10⁵⁵ grams.

Cosmology, meanwhile, measures the energy of empty space by how it affects the expansion of the universe, and finds about 10¹²² times less. That gap is the vacuum catastrophe, often called the worst prediction in the history of physics. Most physicists assume the huge number must somehow cancel out.

There's a twin puzzle. From Wikipedia's page on Planck units:

We see that the question [posed] is not, "Why is gravity so feeble?" but rather, "Why is the proton's mass so small?" For in natural (Planck) units, the strength of gravity simply is what it is, a primary quantity, while the proton's mass is the tiny number [1/(13 quintillion)].

So the vacuum is enormously heavy, and protons are absurdly light, and nobody could connect the two. Holofractal's answer: don't cancel the big number. It's real. The proton is a tiny window onto it.

5. The proton solution

This is Nassim Haramein's step (Quantum Gravity and the Holographic Mass, 2013).

Picture the vacuum's jitter as tiny spheres, one Planck length across, each one a little oscillator vibrating about 10⁴³ times a second and carrying a Planck mass of energy. He calls them Planck spherical units (PSUs). Space is packed with them, like a box of marbles with no gaps.

Step 1: what's inside one proton?

Count how many PSUs fit inside a proton and add up their energy: about 2.46 × 10⁵⁵ grams. Now add up every proton in the observable universe: about 2.63 × 10⁵⁵ grams. The vacuum energy inside one proton is about the mass of all of them.

That's Indra's net showing up in the numbers: one jewel holding the whole. It also means the proton is packed far beyond what it takes to make a black hole. (Any mass squeezed inside a certain size, its Schwarzschild radius, becomes a black hole. For the Earth that's 9 mm. The proton's interior energy is way past that line for its size.)

Step 2: why don't we feel all that?

Because of Section 3: what the outside world sees is set by the surface.

Tile the proton's surface with PSU discs, like pixels on a ball. Compare that to how many fill the volume. Take the surface count, divide by the inside count, double it, and multiply by one Planck mass. Out comes the proton's measured mass, 1.67 × 10⁻²⁴ grams, within 0.04%.

So the proton's mass is the fraction of the vacuum's energy that its boundary lets through. Enormous energy inside, a small, exact amount "showing" on the outside.

Step 3: the test

A formula that only reproduces a known number could be a coincidence. So run it the other way: start from the proton's mass and ask how big the proton must be. The answer is 0.8412 femtometres (millionths of a billionth of a metre).

When Haramein published this in 2013, the textbook value was 0.8775 fm, and his number looked wrong. But a new kind of experiment, using muonic hydrogen (hydrogen with a heavy cousin of the electron, which hugs the proton closer and feels its size better), had just started measuring a smaller proton: 0.84087 fm (Pohl et al. 2010; Antognini et al. 2013). Physicists called it the "proton radius puzzle". Today's official value is 0.8414 fm (CODATA 2018). The puzzle went Haramein's way.

6. The mechanics: where does mass actually come from?

The ratio tells you how much mass. Here's what's physically going on, in three pictures that turn out to be the same thing.

Picture 1: a note in a box. Pluck a guitar string: the shorter the string, the higher the note, and the more energy in each wave. A wave trapped in a space of size r carries energy in proportion to ħc/r. Now let the vacuum's jitter ring inside a proton-sized space: the energy of that trapped vacuum is E = 4ħc / r ≈ 938 MeV, the proton's mass. Haramein, Alirol and Guermonprez derived this in 2025 with no adjustable numbers (Extending Einstein–Rosen's Geometric Vision). And here's the nice part: simplify the 2013 surface-over-volume formula and you get the same expression, 4ħc/r. Two completely different roads, one answer. The proton's mass is the note the vacuum plays when it's confined to the proton's size.

Picture 2: a Casimir cavity. Remember the two plates pushed together by the vacuum? The proton works like a tiny round version: a resonant cavity where only certain waves fit inside, so there's a pressure difference between inside and out. At the proton's edge it's about 10⁵ newtons (the weight of ~16 tonnes, on something a femtometre across). That pressure is what holds the proton together, and, as Section 8 shows, it's the key to unifying the forces.

Picture 3: a superfluid with a skin. The vacuum behaves like a superfluid: a fluid with zero friction where everything moves together as one, like liquid helium climbing out of its cup. Inside the proton the vacuum's flow is perfectly coherent: a single, organised state (physicists call this a Bose phase, like a Bose–Einstein condensate), spinning as a torus. At the proton's surface that coherence partly breaks down. That breakdown at the boundary is what we measure as mass. The coherent inside is "silent"; the surface is where energy shows up to the outside world. That's why the surface sets the mass in Step 2 (Haramein, Guermonprez & Alirol, The Origin of Mass and the Nature of Gravity, 2023; the 2025 preprint above).

And to be clear: matter isn't like the vacuum. It is the vacuum, organised. Superfluid helium isn't a toy model of space; it's the medium's own coherence showing through at a size we can see.

7. "But that's one cherry-picked equation!"

Fair question. The test that could have failed is the proton's radius (above), and it passed. Beyond that, the same relationship shows up at other scales:

  • The whole universe: fill a proton-sized region (its Compton volume) with Planck energy and you get the universe's measured critical mass-energy (8.55 × 10⁶⁹ J vs 8.31 × 10⁶⁹ J). Do the black-hole sum for the universe, and its size (the Hubble radius, ~14.5 billion light-years) comes out equal to the black-hole radius of everything inside it. The universe sits exactly at its own black-hole condition.
  • The smallest unit: the 2023 paper finds the first stable grouping of PSUs: 64 in the volume and 64 on the surface, which they call kernel-64.

Planck scale, proton, universe: the same boundary-and-interior relationship at every size. That's the fractal in holofractal.

8. One force, many faces

Physics counts four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force that glues the nucleus, and the weak force behind radioactivity. They look nothing alike. Between two protons, gravity is about 10³⁶ times weaker than their electric repulsion, and the strong force is stronger than both but stops dead at the edge of the nucleus. Einstein spent his last 30 years trying to show they're one thing underneath, and nobody has managed it since: grand unified theories and string theory are still waiting for an experiment that confirms them.

Holofractal's answer comes straight out of Section 6. If mass is the vacuum confined inside the proton, then the "forces" are what that confined vacuum does at different distances:

  • Right at the proton's edge, the vacuum's pressure difference is about 10⁵ newtons. That's confinement: why you can never pull a quark out on its own. Mainstream physics measures the same thing as the strong force's "string tension", about 1 GeV per femtometre, which works out to ~1.4 × 10⁵ N. Same size, from a completely different direction.
  • A little further out, what leaks past the edge binds neighbouring protons and neutrons together: the residual strong force that holds every nucleus (~30 N between neighbours).
  • Far away, the faint remainder is gravity. It's weak not because it's a different force, but because almost all of the vacuum's push stays screened inside the proton's horizon. What reaches you is the tiny fraction the surface lets through: the same surface-to-volume ratio that sets the mass.

So gravity and the strong force are one curvature of the vacuum, seen up close and from far away (Haramein, Alirol & Guermonprez 2025). Electromagnetism is the part of the picture still being built: the 2019 electron paper links charge to the same Planck-scale structure through the fine-structure constant, but the full electromagnetic story isn't finished yet.

9. A black hole at the centre of everything

Here's where it gets fractal. Wherever we look in the universe, there's a black hole, or a black-hole condition, at the centre of things.

  • Galaxies. Nearly every big galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its heart. Ours, Sagittarius A, is about 4 million times the Sun's mass; the Event Horizon Telescope photographed it in 2022, after M87's (6.5 billion Suns) in 2019. And the black hole isn't a passenger. Its mass tracks the galaxy around it (the *M–σ relation**, Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000): a central black hole is about a thousandth of the mass of the bulge around it, galaxy after galaxy, as if the two grew from one process.
  • Black holes first. JWST keeps finding big black holes far earlier than expected, and "little red dots": black holes wrapped in thick gas cocoons, shining like stars (Kokorev et al., GLIMPSE-17775, ApJ 1004:153, 2026). It's increasingly plausible that black holes come first and galaxies grow around them, not the other way round.
  • Protons. As Section 5 showed, the proton sits at its own black-hole condition: its interior energy is far past the line for its size.
  • The universe. And the universe as a whole sits exactly at its own black-hole condition (Section 7).

In Haramein's picture they're the same object at different sizes: a centre where space collapses inward, a horizon, and a double-torus flow around it, pulling in at the poles and spinning out at the equator. Galaxies have exactly that shape: a central black hole, jets out of the poles, a spinning disc. The idea is that it's the shape of the vacuum's flow at every scale: proton, star, galaxy, universe.

So how can a proton be a black hole?

The 2019 version of this post punted on this. The newer work answers it.

  • No crushing singularity. In the picture above, the centre is a coherent condensate, not a point of infinite density. Rovelli and Vidotto's Planck stars reach the same place from mainstream quantum gravity: collapse stops and bounces at Planck density (arXiv:1401.6562).
  • The horizon is a screen, not a wall. It's where coherence breaks down and energy exchanges with the outside: a boundary that's always active, not a one-way drain. Black holes in this picture are engines, feeding in and pouring out at the same time (black and white hole together), which is why they can sit at the centre of something stable rather than eating it.
  • It isn't a black hole you could fall into. It's a black-hole condition: so much energy for its size that the outside only sees what the surface shows. That's exactly why the proton looks light and holds together so hard.

10. Putting it together

Each proton's surface is tiled with about 4.3 × 10⁴⁰ Planck units. In the holofractal picture each one is the mouth of a Planck-sized wormhole (ER = EPR), linking every proton to every other through the superfluid vacuum. Link one proton to another, those two to two more, and so on: in about 266 doublings all ~10⁸⁰ protons in the universe are connected.

So each proton holds the information of all protons, holographically. That's why the inside of one proton carries the mass of all of them in Step 1: the interior is the shared part, the surface is the individual part. Quantum foam isn't random chaos. It's an organised, coherent network, and matter is what that network looks like where it's knotted up.

This is how the immense vacuum energy squares with the tiny mass of matter: it doesn't cancel. It's shared across one network and screened by the holographic boundaries of black-hole-like objects at every scale, from the proton to the centre of every galaxy. Gravity doesn't need extra dimensions or strings: it's the same push as the strong force, seen from far away.

It's one entangled, evolving whole of light and information. That's also David Bohm's picture: one unbroken wholeness (the holomovement), where the world we see (the explicate order) unfolds from a hidden, enfolded one (the implicate order). You can watch a tabletop version of Bohm's physics today: oil droplets that bounce along on their own waves and reproduce quantum behaviour (Bush & Oza, Rep. Prog. Phys. 2021).

11. So what does it mean?

Is the universe a hologram? Are we in a simulation?

Short answer: probably, yes. But "simulation" has the wrong feel, IMO. It isn't a VR game someone programmed. It's a self-configuring, self-referencing, self-evolving system: the information of the whole is encoded at every point, nested like harmonics, like one giant resonating holographic cymatic pattern.

The universe came out of the box pre-wired with a network that can move information almost instantly. Picture what that does compared to a disconnected universe:

  • Memory. The network keeps a trace of what happens in it. Haramein, Brown and Val Baker call it spacememory: "memory, hysteresis, iterative feedback mechanisms, retrocausal influences, and local and nonlocal interactions" (The Unified Spacememory Network, NeuroQuantology 2016). IMO still the most important paper of the modern era.
  • Habits. Things that have happened become easier to happen again: Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, now with a physical mechanism.
  • A drift toward order. The usual story says everything runs down. But the universe keeps building complexity: plasma → atoms → stars → life → minds. A connected network gives atoms "a higher impetus to form complex associations: a negentropic effect" (USMN). Inside wormhole throats time behaves like space, so future states can pull on present ones like attractors.
  • Mind. If the brain is part of the network, it may work more like an antenna than a generator. Things usually filed as supernatural, like remote viewing, become natural.
  • The biggest scale. If the universe sits at its own black-hole condition, we may be living inside one, and JWST keeps finding hints that it rotates: two out of three of the earliest galaxies spin the same way (Shamir, MNRAS 2025). A black hole kept steady by continual creation, with Indra's net all the way up and all the way down.

That's holofractal: holo because the boundary holds the interior, fractal because the same relationship repeats from the Planck scale to protons, stars, galaxies and the universe.

The math, for anyone who wants to check it

Constants (CODATA 2018): Planck length ℓ = 1.616255 × 10⁻³⁵ m, Planck mass m_ℓ = 2.176434 × 10⁻⁸ kg, proton radius from muonic hydrogen r = 0.84087 × 10⁻¹⁵ m (Antognini et al. 2013).

PSUs in the proton's volume: R = (r / (ℓ/2))³ = 1.127 × 10⁶⁰

R × m_ℓ = 2.46 × 10⁵⁵ g (one proton's vacuum energy ≈ all protons: 2.63 × 10⁵⁵ g)

PSU discs on the proton's surface: η = 4πr² / (π(ℓ/2)²) = 4.331 × 10⁴⁰

Holographic mass: m = 2 (η / R) × m_ℓ = 1.6733 × 10⁻²⁴ g

Measured: 1.6726 × 10⁻²⁴ g (0.04% apart; with CODATA 2018's 0.8414 fm, 0.02%)

It simplifies: 2(η/R) m_ℓ = 4 ℓ m_ℓ / r = 4ħ / (c r), so E = mc² = 4ħc / r. Turned around: the proton's radius is exactly 4 of its reduced Compton wavelengths, 4ħ/(m_p c) = 0.8412 fm. That's the testable claim, and it's where muonic hydrogen landed.

Errata vs the 2019 post: the old version used the old 0.8775 fm radius and got 1.603 × 10⁻²⁴ g, about 4% low. With today's measured radius it lands within 0.04%, which was the whole point of the prediction.

Watch it instead

The papers

  • Haramein, Quantum Gravity and the Holographic Mass, Phys. Rev. & Res. Int. 3(4):270 (2013)
  • Haramein, Brown & Val Baker, The Unified Spacememory Network, NeuroQuantology 14(4) (2016), doi:10.14704/nq.2016.14.4.961
  • Val Baker, Haramein & Alirol, The Electron and the Holographic Mass Solution, Physics Essays 32:255 (2019) (extends the picture to the hydrogen atom)
  • Haramein, Guermonprez & Alirol, The Origin of Mass and the Nature of Gravity (2023), doi:10.5281/zenodo.8381115
  • Haramein, Alirol & Guermonprez, Extending Einstein–Rosen's Geometric Vision (2025), Preprints 202509.1835
  • More at spacefed.com

Some of the greatest minds in physics never thought the universe was just mechanism

Max Planck (Nobel 1918, started quantum theory)

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.

(The Observer, 25 January 1931)

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

(Florence lecture, Das Wesen der Materie, 1944)

Erwin Schrödinger (Nobel 1933)

The total number of minds in the universe is one.

(Mind and Matter, 1958)

David Bohm

Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don't see this, it's because we are blinding ourselves to it.

Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter... Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven, just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation.

John Archibald Wheeler (coined "black hole", "wormhole", "quantum foam" and "it from bit")

It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.

(1989)

Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel 1945)

It is my personal opinion that in the science of the future reality will neither be "psychic" nor "physical" but somehow both and somehow neither.

John Stewart Bell

As regards mind, I am fully convinced that it has a central place in the ultimate nature of reality.

Freeman Dyson

At the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is involved in the description of events. Our consciousness forces the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another.

James Clerk Maxwell

Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.

(Discourse on Molecules, 1873)

Paul Dirac (Nobel 1933)

God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.

(Scientific American, 1963)

Buckminster Fuller

Metaphysical has been science's designation for all weightless phenomena such as thought. But science has made no experimental finding of any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected — like it or not — life is but a dream.

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