'Every opaque body fills the surrounding air with infinite images...'

"by which infinite pyramids diffused in the air present this body all in all and all in every part." — Leonardo da Vinci, 500 years ahead of his time, envisions holography.

The quotation is from page 231 of Martin Kemp's book, "Seen|Unseen: Art, Science and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope," where Kemp explores physicist David Bohm's use of the holographic analogy to illustrate how it is that a reality can exist outside the limits of perception of an individual.

Here is the relevant passage, for context:

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A hologram uses the properties of a laser beam, which holds together and does not disperse, to record the wave field of light scattered by a visible object in the form of an interference pattern on a plate. The "normal" optical array of the object can be reconstituted by a laser to to such effect that we see a fully three-dimensional illusion which even responds within set parameters to the moving of the observer's viewpoint, thus imitating the phenomenon of parallax. Not the least remarkable properties of the holographic "photograph" — and the one which most intrigued Bohm — is that any part of the plate can be used to reconstitute the whole image, down to quite small fragments. This property is similar to Leonardo's theory of the inherent presence of images (what he called "species") at every point in the air around an object: "every opaque body fills the surrounding air with infinite images, by which infinite pyramids diffused in the air present this body all in all and all in every part." Such images only become visible when the right conditions are present; that is to say, in the case of Leonardo's "species," when the eye is placed at a specific position which is situated at an appropriate distance from the object, or, in the case of a hologram, when a laser reconstitutes the image for an appropriately positioned observer. The holographic property of each small part embodying the whole image is clearly very different from a standard photograph. A corner torn from a standard photographic negative will only contain that part of the image that resides in the corner — say, a foot — and certainly cannot be used to print the whole image. We may say, therefore, that the swirling pattern of a holographic plate contains in all its parts the optical order with which our sight operates but that this order is inherent within another level of organization such that we cannot directly see a coherent image of the original object when looking in a normal way at the plate.