**Reality as an Information Process: What Holograms, Wi-Fi, and Quantum Physics Actually Show Us** We are surrounded by phenomena that defy classical notions of matter and energy, yet we describe them using outdated language that obscures their true nature. Take the hologram—a piece of film etched with microscopic interference patterns. When illuminated, it projects a fully three-dimensional image, complete with parallax and occlusion, as if the original object were present. But the film itself is flat, passive, and contains no “object.” What it stores is not matter, not energy, but *structured information*—a precise record of how light waves interacted with the original scene. The 3D illusion emerges not because the film “contains” depth, but because the interference patterns reconstruct the light field when probed. This is not a metaphor; it is an engineering fact. The hologram demonstrates that what we perceive as “reality” can be encoded, stored, and reconstructed from pure relational data, without requiring any physical substance. The same principle applies to the photons that carry Wi-Fi signals through your home. These microwave photons are massless excitations of the electromagnetic field, modulated in frequency and phase to transmit data. Your phone does not “catch” them like baseballs; it decodes their modulations into emails, videos, and web pages. There is no “stuff” being exchanged—only information. X-ray photons, though higher in frequency, operate the same way. Their ability to resolve fine details in bones or materials is not because they “see smaller things,” but because their shorter wavelengths interact with matter at a finer informational grain. This is not magic—it is a direct consequence of wave mechanics. Higher-frequency probes extract higher-resolution data from the same underlying field, just as a finer sieve separates smaller particles. Quantum systems take this further. The double-slit experiment, often mystified as “wave-particle duality,” reveals something far simpler: the behavior of a system depends entirely on what information is extracted from it. When electrons or photons pass through a double slit unmeasured, they produce an interference pattern—a physical signature of multiple possible paths. But if you detect which slit they pass through, the interference vanishes. This is not because the system “collapses” or “chooses” a state, but because the act of measurement *constrains the available data*. The interference was always there, just as all perspectives are encoded in a hologram’s film. Your observation does not create or destroy reality; it selects which subset of the data becomes manifest. Electron microscopes, often said to “see atoms,” do nothing of the sort. They fire electron beams at a sample and record how those electrons scatter. The resulting image is not a direct observation but a computational reconstruction—an extraction of spatial information from interaction patterns. Atoms are not tiny billiard balls waiting to be observed; they are stable excitations in a quantum field, detectable only through their influence on other excitations (like electrons). The microscope’s resolution depends not on “magnification” but on the wavelength of the probing electrons—another confirmation that “seeing” is really *information retrieval*. The implications are unavoidable. Reality does not rely on “particles” or “waves” as fundamental entities. What we call “physical” is simply the subset of information that our instruments and senses decode. The hologram proves that 3D perception can emerge from 2D data. Wi-Fi and X-rays prove that electromagnetic interactions transmit pure information, not “light” in any classical sense. Quantum systems prove that observable outcomes depend on how—and whether—data is extracted. This is not philosophy. It is the inescapable conclusion of experiments we perform daily. The universe is not a collection of objects but a dynamic network of relational data. The sooner we discard the language of “stuff” and embrace the language of information, the sooner we will understand what reality actually is.