If a friend told you that we were all living in a giant hologram, you’d probably tell him to lay off the kush. But incredibly, physicists across the world are thinking the same thing: That what we perceive to be a three-dimensional universe might just be the image of a two-dimensional one, projected across a massive cosmic horizon.

Yes, it sounds more than a little insane. The 3D nature of our world is as fundamental to our sense of reality as the fact that time runs forward. And yet some researchers believe that contradictions between Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics might be reconciled if every three-dimensional object we know and cherish is a projection of tiny, subatomic bytes of information stored in a two-dimensional Flatland.

“If this is true, it’s a really important insight,” Daniel Grumiller, a theoretical physicist at the Vienna University of Technology, told me over the phone. Grumiller, along with physicists Max Riegler, Arjun Bagchi and Rudranil Basu, recently published the very first study offering evidence that the so-called “holographic principle”—that certain 3D spaces can be mathematically reduced to 2D projections—might describe our universe.

@masukuma, it's not only possible to have a being comprising of energy alone, but such a being exists. Apparently, this universe allows for such beings.

I only suggested that there could be beings of pure energy and based on little we know about the universe,you provided the guesswork to fit a certain narrative.

I agree. There could be beings of pure energy.

I only suggested that there could be beings of pure energy and based on little we know about the universe,you provided the guesswork to fit a certain narrative.