Holographic Time: How Temporal Intervals May Encode Themselves in the Frequency Domain 

Sky Nelson-Isaacs    
Independent scholar and physics teacher, El Cerrito High School, El Cerrito, CA        

Email: theskyband@gmail.com 

Presented on Zoom.  You must be a SSE member to register for this free event.

To register, login and then click the registration link.

More information about MAVERICK talks.

Synopsis:

What if time isn't a smoothly flowing background but something more like a hologram — an indivisible whole encoded in the frequency domain? This talk presents a framework theorizing that measurable time intervals behave like filters in digital image processing: just as introducing a sharp boundary on an image introduces Gibbs-like ringing in the frequency spectrum, leading to visual artifacts, subdividing a time interval similarly introduces artifacts into the energy spectrum of a particle rather than simply splitting the journey into parts. In other words, there is a measurable spectral difference between a particle that travels over a given time interval compared to one whose similar journey is composed of two smaller time intervals.

The key insight comes from treating quantum mechanics the way engineers treat signals — using Fourier transform operations that convert between the time and frequency domains. In this picture, what we actually measure are not continuous flows of time but discrete coordinate intervals between interactions, while the smooth "time" in our equations is just an unmeasurable integration parameter. The frequency domain encodes the full structure of a particle's journey as a whole, and any attempt to break that journey into pieces leaves a distinct spectral fingerprint.

The talk will walk through this reasoning visually, using schematics and diagrams at each step, and present two novel predictions: a method for measuring stellar distances through spectral sideband patterns, and a new approach to detecting eavesdropping in quantum communication channels. Validation or falsification of these two predictions provides ground for consideration or rejection of the idea of holographic time.  

Biography: 

Sky Nelson-Isaacs is a theoretical physicist, author, and founder of the Synchronicity Institute. He holds a master's degree in physics from San Francisco State University and a BS from UC Berkeley. His research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and the holographic structure of time has been published in the journal Quantum Reports (MDPI). He is the author of two books, Living in Flow and Leap to Wholeness, which connect scientific insight with practical approaches to personal growth. Nelson-Isaacs is also a high school physics teacher, and a multi-instrumentalist with eleven albums of original music.