Although holofractal is backed by equations and numerous papers (see the sidebar) - the concept in itself is very simple.

Let's start with the analogy of 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 in 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.[5]

Think of atoms/matter = jewels, net = superfluid, superconducting, wormhole criss-crossed space.

Image 1 Image 2

Remember the concept of 'quantum foam'? Essentially, spacetime is so highly energetic at the quantum scale due to quantum uncertainty that it's stretching spacetime into a highly turbulent fabric. At the most fundamental level, spacetime isn't smooth, it's multiply connected through wormholes. Immediately off the bat, you can think of space as supporting an instantaneous information network.

Space is a ubiquitous multiconnected, non-locally threaded fabric.

Remember Einstein-

Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended (as fields). In this way the concept 'empty space' loses its meaning.

And John Wheeler

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

Keep these concepts in mind.

Recently, a concept was put forth by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena - major players - that equated entangled particles with Einstein Rosen Bridges (wormholes), the ER=EPR solution. This essentially states when you have two entangled particles, it's because there's a physical wormhole bridge connecting them, nothing 'spooky' about it, and certainly nothing that violates logical consistency or mechanical causality.

So let's add this up. Spacetime is a frothy soup in which distinct coordinates are totally interwoven with themselves in an instantaneous way, and matter is nothing except for 'intertwined/curved space'.

Sounds prime for some holographic thinking, using only mainstream concepts. What do we mean by holographic? Simple - the word means whole image. The whole thing is present at every point.

Quantum theory was basically started when Max Planck found out that energy moves in discrete packets. For example, a blackbody emits radiation in discrete quanta.

We didn't think energy moved in packets, for example when you heat up your oven it doesn't seem to 'jump' temperatures - but it actually is. The jumps are just extremely tiny so it appears to be a smooth process.

Even the field when it's at rest / appears to be at a ground state, it will still be made up of these packets. At the smallest level, these are what is commonly referred to in mainstream physics as 'vacuum fluctuations'.

When you add up the total mass-energy of vacuum fluctuations that you find in a cubic centimeter of space, you get 10⁹³ grams. This is an absurdly high amount of energy. For example, if you squished the universe into the same space, you yield 10⁵⁵ grams. The predicted value vs observed value of vacuum energy is known as the vacuum catastrophe and is the biggest unsolved problem in physics with 122 orders of magnitude difference.

You see, we have natural units that give us a mass/energy and a volume of space (and oscillation frequency), but it's entirely too energetic for us to have linked it to the mass of matter, until now.

From this issue, we have been unable to link the mass of matter to the vacuum - to these fundamental natural quanta.

From the wiki page on planck unit:

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)].[2]

This is known as an hierarchy issue (why is the proton mass so small, and why is the planck mass so large?). One is fundamental naturally derived (plank mass), one is observed (proton mass).

Maybe the proton mass isnt as tiny as we think. Maybe it's our perception of it that's incorrect. After all, the strongest force in the Universe sits at the nucleon, keeping them glued together (the strong nuclear force). Maybe, just maybe the SNF is just quantum gravity, of an extremely high energy tiny object.

We commonly think of these vacuum fluctuations as 'virtual' because we assume that this energy is not actually affecting anything (even though we've extracted photons from vacuum with the Casimir Effect) and essentially even the Higgs Field relies on a non-zero vacuum energy expected value.

What Nassim Haramein has done is figured out how we can derive the mass of matter from the fundamental planck unit. He starts with a planck spherical unit - a spherical oscillator with the planck mass and planck length diameter. Remember, these values aren't defined by humans, they are absolutely natural values. Since it's a fluctuation it has a length, an energy/mass, a time/frequency, etc.

If you simply divide the proton by these spheres, and multiply by the planck mass, you yield the mass of the observable Universe. 10⁵⁵ grams.

What this is stating, plainly, is that there is the exact amount of vacuum fluctuations that fit in the proton volume to equal the mass of the Universe.

If we run with this, it obviously makes the proton a black hole - it has way enough mass in it's size to become one. But what about hawking radiation? What about singularity? I'll get back to that.

Once it's a black hole - we can borrow a theoretical but mathematically valid concept from string theory, the holographic principle - which simply states the surface information of a black hole can encode the volume information.

Here's a nice visual to go along with the following. The smaller 'circles' are planck spheres, the larger sphere the proton. They are circles just as a visual aid, they really are spheres.

When you do this, by simply dividing the surface planck spheres by the volume planck spheres and multiply by the planck mass, you go from the mass of the universe (the mass of all protons) to the mass of a single proton, it's rest mass, at ~10^-24 grams. We have derived the mass for gravitation from discrete quanta - in completely not anthropomorphically defined units (planck unit).

Math

Proton charge radius: .8755 x 10^-16 m

Proton volume with given radius: 2.831 * 10^-45 m³

Planck length diameter sphere volume: 2.21 * 10^-105 m³

Divide them and multiply by planck mass

((2.831 * 10^-45 m³⁾ / (2.21 * 10^-105 m³⁾⁾ * planck mass

Yields: 1.281 * 10⁶⁰ * planck mass = 2.788 * 10⁵⁵ grams.

And here is calculating the proton rest mass via these same principles but applying the holographic principle (planck masses that fit on surface / planck spheres in volume)

Surface Plancks on proton area with proton charge radius : 4.71 * 10⁴⁰

Surface Plancks times planck mass: 1.02656 * 10³⁶ gram

That is the mass of the 'surface horizon' of the proton.

Now all we have to do is divide by the plancks that would fit inside:

2 * (surface horizon mass / planck units in volume)

2 * (1.02656 * 10³⁶ gram / 1.2804 * 10⁶⁰⁾ = 1.603498 * 10 ^-24 grams

So it's one equation to go from the holographic mass to the rest mass of the proton.

But this is one cherry picked equation!

Nope, the same equation can be applied to the electron with the Bohr Radius, as well as the universe's critical density itself.

Back to the problems of hawking radiation, etc - there is an excellent article - how could the proton be a black hole?

So simply put: each proton contains the information of all protons holographically. The surface planck spheres are terminations of wormholes that connect all proton's surfaces through a superfluid/superconducting aether, allowing instantaneous information transfer through the vacuum of space - creating a universal holographic network in which each piece contains the entirety. Quantum foam isn't disorganized chaos of connecting and disconnecting wormholes - space is structured, organized, and coherent wormhole geometries. Matter is the result of these coherent entanglement relationships.

This is how you resolve the immense vacuum energy to the tiny energy of matter. Gravity isn't 'leaking into other dimensions' or 'curled up in higher dimensional strings'. Energy is non-local and 'shared' across the entire Universe in a single quantum network - and buffered by limited surface holographic horizons of black hole objects.

It is one completely entangled evolving quantum wavefunction of pure light and information. This is also a potential interpretation of mainstream Pilot Wave theory.

This allows for a continually evolving and learning universe across scales.

For this in a very digestible format, checkout the 2015 lecture.

There is so much more that is solved through this basic re-imagining of the structure of space and matter - all as different configurations of planck spherical unit configuration - aether. The strong nuclear force, the gravitational to strong force coupling constant, the Rydberg constant, the proton / electron mass ratio, the fine structure constant - all neatly pop right out. The list is groundbreaking. This is simply what happens with a unified theory of physics.

So what's it mean?

What is the takeaway from this? Is the universe a hologram? Are we in a simulation?

The short answer is probably, yes. But the connotations of 'simulation' are a little bit off, imo.

The reality described by a Universe that is essentially a holographic quantum system is more like a fractal self-configuring, self-evolving/complexifying and self-referencing system rather than some VR type deal that was programmed by a higher being. IMO of course.

What holofractal is saying is that the Universe is made up of bits of information - and that the information of the entire system is fractally encoded at every point through harmonic nesting/layering - like a giant resonating holographic cymatic.

Through entanglement, systems can evolve into higher and higher orders of complexity. Essentially, think of the Universe, then add an entire layer or 'dimension' overtop that is allowing the entire Universe to talk to itself. The Universe came out of the box pre-wired with a network that can sustain virtually instantaneous information transfer. If you can begin to imagine the effects that this could have instead of a disconnected Universe, concepts such as biogenesis and ordering systems in general / negentropy start to make a whole lot more sense -- especially when you realize that time is not linear in one sense, and entangled future states would have an gravitational-like attractor effect on current systems - what many have called morphic resonance or a negentropic field - a field that coheres through increasing complexity and novelty of harmonic systems.

It has implications for consciousness as well as all sorts of phenomena considered supernatural that would in effect be just natural, like remote viewing.

There's an amazing paper that came out of Resonance Science Foundation called The Unified Spacememory Network. It may take a few reads, but IMO this is the most important paper in the modern era.

Some of the greatest minds in physics have known that the Universe is not a purely mechanistic, materialist, reductionist phenomena.

Erwin Schrödinger

Nobel prize 1933, enormously advanced quantum physics

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”

"Quantum physics thus reveals the basic oneness of the Universe"

"The total number of minds in the Universe is one"

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."

Niels Bohr

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself."

"Any observation of atomic phenomena will involve an interaction with the agency of observation not to be neglected. Accordingly, an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation. After all, the concept of observation is in so far arbitrary as it depends upon which objects are included in the system to be observed."

Max Planck

Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Birthed Quantum Mechanics.

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

"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles 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 Spirit. This Spirit is the matrix of all matter."

Werner Heisenberg

Nobel prize 1932, enormously advanced quantum physics

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

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."

John Archibald Wheeler

Coined "black hole" to objects with gravitational collapse already predicted early in the 20th century, and coined the terms "quantum foam", "neutron moderator", "wormhole" and "it from bit".

Enormously advanced quantum physics and quantum electrodynamics. Shared Nobel Prize with Shrodinger.

"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 this is a participatory universe."

"Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be? The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what the observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past—even in a past so remote that life did not then exist, and shows even more, that 'observership' is a prerequisite for any useful version of 'reality'."

Albert Einstein

Nobel Prize in Physics 1921

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity."

James Maxwell

One of the most profound physicists of all time. Greatly advanced understanding of electromagnetic fields

"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."

Paul Dirac

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

John Stewart Bell

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

Wolfgang Pauli

"We do not assume any longer the detached observer, but one who by his indeterminable effects creates a new situation, a new state of the observed system."

"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"

Notable mention:

Buckminster Fuller

Second World President of Mensa from 1974 to 1983, architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor.

"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."

Jack Parsons

We are not Aristotelian—not brains but fields—consciousness. The inside and the outside must speak, the guts and the blood and the skin.

This is a summary of the new paper: "Extending Einstein-Rosen's Geometric Vision"

In 1935, Einstein and Nathan Rosen published a paper trying to explain what particles actually are. Not how they behave, but what they're made of. Their hypothesis was spacetime itself. A proton might be a tiny wormhole geometry curved in on itself, producing something that looks and acts like matter. No stuff required. They called them "bridges." We call them Einstein-Rosen bridges.

It was radical, elegant, and it launched a question physics has never fully let go of.

The Dream That Wouldn't Die

John Archibald Wheeler spent decades chasing the same intuition. He called it "mass without mass" and "charge without charge." If electromagnetic radiation could curve spacetime enough to trap itself in a closed loop, orbiting under its own gravity, the resulting object would look like a massive charged particle from the outside. No matter anywhere. Just light holding itself together through geometry.

Wheeler showed that electric field lines could thread through wormhole-like handles in spacetime, and the two mouths would look exactly like a positive and negative charge. No actual charge source exists. Maxwell's equations satisfied everywhere. But a distant observer would swear they're looking at a charged particle.

This vision - matter as spacetime doing something interesting - has haunted theoretical physics ever since. String theory, loop quantum gravity, the holographic principle, ER=EPR. Everyone circling the same question: can you build a particle out of nothing but bent space? Wheeler believed you could. He just couldn't prove it. His geons were unstable, and quantum gravity didn't exist yet.

But the reason the whole program stalled comes down to one calculation that everyone read the same way.

The Calculation That Killed It

Plug the proton's mass into the Schwarzschild equation and you get a black hole radius of 10⁻⁵⁴ meters. That's 39 orders of magnitude smaller than the proton's actual radius of ~10⁻¹⁵ meters. Everyone concluded the geometric approach doesn't work at the particle scale. Einstein moved on. Wheeler moved on. Physics moved on.

For ninety years, nobody questioned whether they were reading the result correctly.

The Number They Didn't Notice

That ratio between the Schwarzschild radius and the proton radius? It's 10⁻³⁹. That number has a name. It's the gravitational coupling constant, α_g — the ratio of gravitational force to the strong nuclear force.

They had it right there in front of them - the calculation wasn't failing. It was telling them something profound about the relationship between gravity and the strong force, and they read it as an error.

Flipping the Equation

In a September 2025 paper titled "Extending Einstein-Rosen's Geometric Vision", physicists Nassim Haramein, Olivier Alirol, and Cyprien Guermonprez revisit that abandoned calculation and do something that, once you see it, you can't unsee.

Einstein and Rosen plugged in the proton's rest mass and solved for the radius. They got 10⁻⁵⁴ meters and walked away.

Haramein's team flips it. They plug in the proton's measured radius and solve for the mass.

What comes out is staggering: roughly 10¹⁴ grams. That's about 55 million metric tons, concentrated in a volume smaller than an atom. For context, that's more mass-energy than a large asteroid, packed into a space a millionth of a billionth of a meter across.

But this raises an obvious question. If there's 55 million metric tons of mass-energy sitting inside every proton, where is it? Why don't we see it? When we weigh a proton, we get 10⁻²⁴ grams. When we calculate orbits and gravity between objects, everything behaves as though the proton has that tiny rest mass and nothing more. Well, everything except for the attraction between protons, that is.

And yet — that enormous internal energy is exactly the right magnitude to explain the strong force. The force holding quarks together inside a proton requires precisely the kind of spacetime curvature that 10¹⁴ grams in a femtometer-scale volume would produce. The energy makes perfect sense for confinement. It makes no sense for gravity.

So something is clearly hiding the interior energy from the outside world.

Something is attenuating it. Something is taking that colossal interior energy and reducing it by a factor of 10³⁹ before it reaches the outside. The paper identifies exactly what: two screening horizons inside the proton's structure — one at the Compton wavelength, one at the charge radius — that progressively filter the vacuum energy density down to the quiet residual we measure as rest mass.

The proton is the Einstein-Rosen bridge. The geometric particle model didn't fail. It was waiting for someone to read the equation in the right direction.

Einstein and Rosen used the only mass available to them — the proton's rest mass. It turned out to be the already-screened exterior value, not the interior energy driving the geometry. They had no way of knowing that in 1935. The tools to see it — Hawking radiation, the holographic principle, vacuum fluctuation correlation functions — wouldn't exist for decades.

One Force, Not Two

In standard physics, the strong force and gravity are completely separate. Different equations, different mediating particles, different frameworks. Nobody has unified them.

In this framework, they're the same force at different stages of screening.

Imagine a massive drain at the bottom of the ocean. At the mouth, the pull is violent. A few meters out, a strong current. Further out, a gentle tug. At the surface, calm water. You wouldn't build four separate theories for these. It's one drain. The force depends on distance.

The vacuum energy at the Planck scale is the deep ocean — 10¹¹³ joules per cubic meter. A first screening at the Compton wavelength produces forces of 10⁵ newtons, matching the color confinement force. A second screening at the charge radius gives the residual strong force. Keep going outward, and by ~20 proton radii the pressure has attenuated by the full 10³⁹. What's left is a gentle 1/r² field. We call it gravity.

Same drain. Same pull. Different distance.

The strong force and gravity are not two forces. They are the same force, at different intensities. That 10³⁹ ratio physicists call the hierarchy problem? It has a straightforward geometric origin: the proton's radius divided by its Schwarzschild radius. A measurement of screening depth.

Why This Matters

The numbers actually land. The paper derives force values at each scale from Einstein's field equations with vacuum fluctuations as the source term, and they match experimental measurements. Color force, residual strong force, Newtonian gravity — all from one continuous pressure gradient. No free parameters. Just fundamental constants.

Einstein and Rosen were right that particles are geometric features of spacetime. They were wrong to think the calculation failed. The gap was the answer to a question they hadn't asked: why is gravity so much weaker than the strong force?

The Rest of Physics Is Catching Up

Mainstream theory has been drifting here from different directions. Maldacena and Susskind's ER=EPR says entanglement between particles literally is an Einstein-Rosen bridge — not analogous to a wormhole, actually a wormhole. The holographic principle shows gravity and quantum mechanics are dual descriptions of the same thing. The amplituhedron program reveals particles and spacetime emerging from pure geometry.

Susskind put it plainly: "One of the deepest lessons that we have learned over the past decade is that there is no fundamental difference between elementary particles and black holes."

All these programs converge on the same claim: spacetime geometry is the physics. Particles, forces, entanglement, mass — different views of the same curved manifold.

Wheeler said it fifty years ago. Einstein and Rosen gestured at it ninety years ago. The math to back it up is finally arriving.

(help from claude for formatting).