Bizarre speak yes, yet their work led Bohr, Planck, Wheeler, and many other modern theoretical physicists toward that conclusion. Given the revelations of relativity and quantum mechanics, I am not sure there is any way to speak of the fundamentals of nature that does not sound bizarre, at least at first. It is perhaps a process of unlearning what one has learned before one can fully contemplate the alternatives. Only then can the mind open sufficiently to work the new revelations into a new (if more nebulous) model. This if anything was Einstein’s greatest strength when contemplating relativity, yet paradoxically, it was also his greatest barrier to accepting the implications of quantum mechanics. Even the great out of the box thinker had his biases which clouded his vision at times.
When you think about it, mind is the fundamental fabric to which any scientist must apply their rigor. They may believe they are conducting experiments on an independent physical world, but any empirical evidence they collect must enter through the senses and be interpreted and modeled by their own mind before they can contemplate it at all. What they probe and study is the holographic world projected against the fundamental fabric of their own minds. From where the senses collect that empirical evidence to construct that world cannot really be known for sure. Is there a “real” physical world out there that we are “in”, or is the only world there is the holographic ones projected against the fabric of our own minds? Is there a “real” world out there which we are sensing, or are the senses themselves just a part of a larger virtual reality illusion?
I don’t have the answer, just more questions that make me wonder. Why should the speed of light be a constant? Why should the passage of time be dependent on the velocity of the subject? How is it that matter can, through gravity, slow the passage of time? Why should matter behave as a wave when we are not looking but a particle when we are? How is it that one particle of an entangled pair can respond instantly to a measurement on the other regardless of distance? How can space and time be one thing, interchangeable with each other? And there are many more bizarre facts of nature that raise more questions.
These are facts of science not readily accessible to the holographic worlds we create in our minds, and once known, they do not fit in easily. We struggle to find a place for them among the contradictory facts that we have already constructed with the data our senses have been giving us all along. Yet mathematics predicted and confirms their truth and we have already begun to utilize them to manipulate our world(s?) though our technology. There are many practical types, even among the physicists themselves, who say don’t worry about the philosophical implications, just “shut up and calculate”, and I suppose this is as valid a stance as any. But I am more curious, I find the whole thing fascinating and I can’t help it if I have not yet lost my sense of wonder about the bigger picture. The more wondering I do about it, the more I wonder whether there is any physical world beyond that of the holographic physical one I am projecting against the fabric of my own mind.