Does light travel? In this conversation, polymath Robert Edward Grant tells Billy Carson that it does not, at least not in the way most people picture it. In Grant's telling, a photon is an excitation handed from point to point across a field, the way a stadium wave circles the arena while every fan stays in their seat. The two use that idea as a doorway into a case they share: that the universe is holographic, fractal and mental rather than material.
A lot rides on the question. If light is a pattern refreshed across a field rather than a moving thing, the world starts to look like a screen or a simulation, with the observer at the centre. This article sets out what each man says, then what mainstream physics says.
What the video covers
Who Robert Edward Grant is (from about 0:50)
Grant describes himself as a polymath, music theorist, mathematician and entrepreneur who says he has founded 11 companies. Carson explains that his book The Fractal Holographic Universe grew out of a three-and-a-half-hour lecture he first gave at Contact in the Desert in 2017, and out of meetings with theoretical physicist Sylvester James Gates Jr.
Light, darkness and the eye (from about 3:10)
Grant calls reality a matrix of mind, paraphrasing a line widely attributed to Max Planck that there is no matter as such, and comparing experience to Plato's allegory of the cave. Light and dark, he says, are opposite conditions of one thing: "It's not actually the absence of light. It's the absorbed condition of light's reflection." In a dark room the molecules still resonate at frequencies too faint or outside the visible range. Seeing requires the eye to resonate with what it sees, which is why birds perceive colours humans cannot.
The world, for Grant, reflects our own consciousness: a mental universe more than a material one. He ties this to the first Hermetic principle, that all is mind (see the Kybalion and the seven Hermetic principles), and to the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, citing the Scientific American headline that local realism is false.
Pixels, frames and the stadium wave (from about 6:10)
Carson turns to holograms, where "The whole is always in the smallest part." At the smallest scales, he says, matter looks pixelated, so reality may run frame by frame, with light re-energizing from pixel to pixel rather than flying through space.
Grant credits Walter Russell, alongside Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla. Russell, he says, described cubic divisions of space-time that behave like the LEDs on a screen: in a game of Pong, nothing actually crosses the glass. Hence the stadium wave, where each fan stands and sits and only the pattern moves. Likewise, the tsunami that reached California after the 2011 Fukushima earthquake did not carry the reactor's water across the Pacific; the water rose and fell in place. His conclusion: "So I don't believe that light actually travels."
Observation, rendering and the headset (from about 10:00)
If local realism is false, Grant asks, does the moon exist when nobody looks? A holographic universe, he suggests, would render only what is observed, as a video game does. Guests who tour a LiDAR-scanned Great Pyramid in his Apple Vision Pro, he says, take it off convinced we live in a matrix. He describes a conscious universe, the one dividing itself infinitely, with mathematics as its language. Objective truth, he says, can only be approached by collecting many subjective views.
As above, so below: the brain in the dark (from about 14:50)
Carson calls this as above, so below in action. The brain, a fractal of the universe, sits in darkness, sends the five senses out for data, and projects a hologram of what is outside; the universe likewise divides itself into countless beings to experience life. Games like No Man's Sky show humans building universes too, and he doubts we are near base reality. Grant answers with a dream within a dream, and wonders whether a galaxy is a DVD seen from inside. Carson adds that atoms are almost entirely empty space. See our explainer on simulation theory.
The hand and the table (from about 18:00)
The two discuss a puzzle: if a hand is re-rendered at every millimetre and matter is mostly space, why can fingers not pass through a table? Grant's answer is perspective. People are dimensionally limited avatars of a higher self, each with a note to play in what he reads as the meaning of universe: one song.
Opposites, judgment and what we speak (from about 19:50)
Grant argues that we learn through opposites: a soul here to learn unconditional love meets conditional love until it stops judging it, and what we resist persists. The two discuss confirmation bias, the hammer that keeps finding nails. Carson adds that vocal frequencies joined to intent help shape what we perceive, so the task is to find solutions, not just name problems: "We're speaking solutions over ourselves and over the universe."
Invictus, the pony and the higher self (from about 23:45)
Grant recites William Ernest Henley's Invictus, linked to Nelson Mandela's prison years, and argues that blaming bloodlines or secret groups is a confession of victimhood. He retells the Christmas-morning story Ronald Reagan liked, of the optimist who digs through manure sure there is a pony in there. The higher self, he says, chose its experiences, and the universe grows by gathering perspectives into empathy, so using the matrix as an excuse for callousness misses the point.
Codes in space-time and in DNA (from about 29:35)
Carson describes interviewing Gates, whose work on adinkras, diagrams of supersymmetry equations, turned up error-correcting codes. Carson says they match the codes behind web browsers, pointing to a programmed universe built as an experiment in empathy.
Grant, who says he holds patents on combinatorial analysis of DNA, ties each person's light signature to their DNA. Arranging the elements as a periodic wave in octaves, he says, implies 137 elements, a number he links to Richard Feynman. Using digital roots (a mod-9 sum of digits), he notes that the digits of 1/7, 0.142857, sum to 27 and then 9. Counting adenine with thymine, and guanine with cytosine, plus one for the phosphate backbone, he gets 9 for both pairs; when transfer RNA swaps in uracil, the sum shifts by one, giving zeros and ones, a binary code behind the 64 codons. Carson adds that 64 tetrahedrons fit into the Flower of Life; our guide to sacred geometry sorts out what is mathematical there.
The 24 precepts and the belief-system cage (from about 39:50)
Grant reads from his 24 Precepts of Universal Mind, written, he says, in one 45-minute burst at night. Math without meaning, he argues, is only information. The precepts describe life as a multiplayer spiritual simulation chosen by a higher self. Carson closes on growth: "Consciousness will only expand to the volume of the belief system cage that we create unconsciously."
Key takeaways
- Grant's central claim is that light is not a travelling object but an excitation recreated across a field, like a stadium wave.
- He treats darkness as the absorbed condition of light's reflection, and sight as resonance.
- Both men read the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics as support for an observer-centred, mental universe.
- Carson frames the brain as a fractal of the universe that builds a hologram from sensory data.
- The code claims rest on Gates' adinkra work and Grant's digital-root analysis of DNA.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson brings the fractal frame. The hologram's defining property, that every fragment carries the whole, is for him the scientific face of the Hermetic principle of correspondence. The brain building a world from sensory data is the universe in miniature, and the virtual worlds humans now build are the same pattern one level down. He develops that model in The Fractal Holographic Universe explained.
He reads Gates' codes as evidence that space-time runs on something like a program. The point is empowerment, not detachment: if reality responds to attention and speech, speaking solutions moves people forward, and a simulated universe makes no one less real, since each person is a fractal of the creator.
What mainstream scholarship says
In standard physics, light does travel. Photons are quanta of the electromagnetic field and move through a vacuum at about 299,792 km per second. The stadium-wave picture captures something real, that a wave is an excitation of a field, but a photon carries energy and momentum from source to absorber, which is what pushes a solar sail. Objects in a dark room do emit infrared, but that is thermal emission, not stored reflection.
The 2022 Nobel went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for entangled-photon experiments that violate Bell inequalities. They rule out local hidden-variable theories; they do not show there is no external world, and the moon-vanishes-when-unobserved line is a popular overstatement. Gates' adinkra codes are a genuine mathematical result, but within supersymmetry models that lack experimental confirmation; a code in an equation is not proof the universe runs software. Digital roots are a base-10 artifact: because 10 leaves a remainder of 1 when divided by 9, patterns of nine turn up in many unrelated places, and the transcript does not show how the per-base DNA figures are derived.
The holographic principle itself is serious physics, developed by Jacob Bekenstein, Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena: the information in a region can be encoded on its boundary. That is distinct from the optical-hologram image of the whole in every part, and from claims that the universe is mental.
Watch, read and go deeper
For the physics of the holographic principle, start with Is the universe a hologram?. Everything related sits on the holographic universe topic hub. The audio version is on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast episode page, and Grant's own series streams on 4BK TV as Robert Edward Grant.
Frequently asked questions
Does light actually travel?
In mainstream physics, yes. Photons, the quanta of the electromagnetic field, move at about 299,792 km per second in a vacuum and carry energy and momentum. Robert Edward Grant argues instead, following Walter Russell, that light is an excitation passed across a field, like a stadium wave.
What did the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics show?
Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger were honoured for entangled-photon experiments that violate Bell inequalities. The results rule out local hidden-variable theories, so nature cannot be both local and realist in the classical sense. They do not prove that objects vanish when unobserved.
What is the holographic principle?
It is a proposal in theoretical physics that the information in a volume of space can be described on its boundary. It grew from black-hole research by Bekenstein, 't Hooft and Susskind and was made precise by Maldacena. Billy Carson's fractal holographic model draws on it but extends it to consciousness.
Who is Robert Edward Grant?
Grant describes himself as a polymath: music theorist, mathematician, geometer and student of Egyptology and esoterica. He says he has founded 11 companies and led nearly 30,000 people at Bausch + Lomb, and he has his own series on 4BK TV.
Sources mentioned
Carson refers to his book The Fractal Holographic Universe, his 2017 Contact in the Desert lecture and Sylvester James Gates Jr.'s work on adinkras and error-correcting codes. Grant cites Max Planck, Plato's allegory of the cave, the Hermetic principle that all is mind, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics and Scientific American's coverage, Walter Russell, Guglielmo Marconi, Nikola Tesla, Richard Feynman, Henley's Invictus, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan's Christmas story, and his own 24 Precepts of Universal Mind. Standard references: The Kybalion (1908), Maldacena's 1997 AdS/CFT paper and Susskind's 1995 paper The World as a Hologram.
