Today I made two @dbuzz posts about holograms in the news. Or is it "holograms" in the news?

I know that the word "hologram" was coined by physicist Dr. Dennis Gabor from the Greek words "holos" meaning "whole" and "gramma" meaning "written". I also know that in physics a hologram has the technical requirement of being made from interference patterns formed using a coherent wavelength.

Portrait of Dr. Dennis Gabor (hologram)
Image Source: MIT Museum

Back when I was participating in Steemhunt on the "other blockchain" I would reply to hunts that featured "holographic" products that were really lenticular or volumetric and point out that those products really weren't "holograms". Nowadays though I've reached a state of being more tolerant of people labeling things that look 3D as "holograms".

I know what the physics definition of a "hologram" is. I also know what the computer science definition of a "computer" is but that definition has existed since after World War 2. Up until WWII the word "computer" referred to a human who did math calculations by hand. Maybe the word "hologram" should evolve to embrace the technological changes that are leading to things such as holoportation.

I've tried checking U.S. federal law and I can't seem to find any definition of what "hologram" would be for a consumer product like there are for claiming a product contains "chocolate" or that a product is "non-toxic". I suspect based on some pseudoscience stuff I've seen peddled on-line that it is also fair game to slap the terms "quantum" and "zero point" on any product based on a whim. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's a bad thing. Some people believe the Universe is a hologram so what wouldn't be a hologram?

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