I don’t make any pretense at understanding the physics and math at all, but if it is true I want to reboot and a better body dammit!
I don’t pretend to understand it either, but this finding apparently doesn’t imply we’re living in the Matrix or anything like that. Here is a summary of another short article on the subject from here:
[QUOTE=intro to article]
There’s a web post from the Nature website going around entitled "Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram. "It’s an interesting concept, but suffice it to say, the universe is not a hologram, certainly not in the way people think of holograms.
[/QUOTE]
<<snip science stuff>>
[QUOTE=conclusion from article]
From this you get a headline implying that we live in a hologram. On twitter, Ethan Siegel proposed a more sensible headline: “Important idea of string theory shown not to be mathematically inconsistent in one particular way”.
Of course that would probably get less attention.
[/QUOTE]
We tend to think of the universe as being made up as objects floating around in 3-D space. This way of conceptualizing reality seems so intuitively obvious and natural that it’s hard to believe that it might not be true.
However, physicists have discovered that they can construct alternate models of reality that aren’t “objects in 3-D space”. And when they use these models to perform calculations, they get the right answer – they’re able to accurate predict how the universe behaves. And furthermore, sometime the calculations are easier to perform using these alternate models.
It’s like switching between Cartesian and polar coordinates. Some calculations are easier in one coordinate system. Some are easier in the other.
Which leads to an interesting idea: Maybe our “objects in 3-D space” view of reality is really just a computational convenience. Maybe it’s just a convenient coordinate system for solving the sorts of survival problems that our ancestors were faced with on the African veldt. And maybe “reality” is actually closer to the sorts of mathematical models that physicists are now exploring … .
The very fact that mathematics can be used to accurately predict real-world events is always amazing to me. Either mathematics is a fundamental characteristic of what we blithely call reality, or it a component of something more primitive. In either case, we find that mathematics allows us a method of plumbing the depths of reality in a manner that mere physical experimentation is not able to match.
One of the implications of this is the idea that gravity propagates in a non-three-dimensional manner. I look forward to new research into this.
That notion inspired the 1960 article The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.
I am happy that I can reconcile my checkbook …
[actually a joke, I used to work doing some fairly arcane contract and billing issues for a fairly major company. 
I can manage real basic math, but some of the really arcane stuff is baffling to me. I like my numbers to be on a spreadsheet and behave!]
Can someone provide a working metaphor for what this means? I heard about this a few days ago and do not understand the math. What is ‘real’ then and how is what we are seeing ‘not real’?
I’ve heard this theory also explains why gravity is so weak, how does that work?
Have you ever played a 3-D videogame? Looking at the screen, it appears to be taking place within a real 3-D space. But that’s just an illusion created by your brain responding to the image on the screen. The actual “space” that the game takes place in is just data stored in some memory chips.
The “real” world that you see is a construct assembled by your brain to make sense of the how your retina is being stimulated. Maybe that stimulation is actually the product of rays of light traveling through 3-D space. Or maybe it’s the product of some other natural process – a complicated interaction unfolding on a 2-D surface, for example. Right now we really can’t say for sure one way or the other.
You “see” a 3-D world because that’s how the human brain organizes the incoming data from your retina. But that doesn’t mean that the world is really 3-D. May 3-D is merely a useful computation space for solving certain sorts of predator-prey problems and social challenges. It’s entirely possible that if we look hard enough we might discover that there are certain subtle features of the universe that are incompatible with it actually having a 3-D structure.
One of ideas is that gravity propagates along another dimension and therefore its effects are attenuated. Here is a link that is a little abstruse but useful nevertheless.
Given the black hole that is television Jim Parsons can expect his contract to be renewed for another 13.8 billion years.
We humans have invented a lot of scientific and medical tools to map the world. X-rays, CAT scans, PET scans, radar, sonar, laser displacement sensors, mass spectrometry etc. etc. Wouldn’t those (since they don’t directly rely on the brain) have hinted that reality is 2D?
I first heard about this in the context of black holes. It turns out all the information about everything that has fallen into a black hole isn’t lost, it’s stored on the two dimensional surface of the event horizon.
So, it turns out the math that allows scientists to describe information as existing on a two dimensional surface works well to describe our 3D universe as well, so why not? We could be a holographic representation of information that actually exists on the 2D surface of the universe.
They still need to explain how we get “projected” into 3D.
Is the universe analogue or digital?