Physicists have yet to articulate a general framework for addressing these questions. Given that gravity and quantum mechanics are both central to the reasoning, you might expect that string theory would provide a potent context for theoretical explorations. But when ’t Hooft first formulated the holographic concept, he doubted that string theory would be able to advance the subject, noting, “Nature is much more crazy at the Planck scale than even string theorists could have imagined.”13 Less than a decade later, string theory proved ’t Hooft wrong by proving him right. In a landmark paper, a
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