A Hologram Shows How Space Could Pop Into Existence

remember buying my first hologram as a college student in the mid-1980s. It showed a bed of nails. I came across it at a gallery in what was then the world’s capital of spacey trinkets, Haight Street in San Francisco. When I picked it up, the hologram looked like a featureless sheet of film, but when I held it under the right lighting at the right angle, the nails popped out aggressively. The hologram never failed to get a shocked reaction from people. It worked because the image of the nails was smeared across the entire film, so that it would be reconstituted in slightly different