In the early 1990s, the Dutch Nobel laureate Gerard ’t Hooft and Leonard Susskind, the same physicist who coinvented string theory, suggested that the universe itself might operate in a manner analogous to a hologram. They put forward the startling idea that the comings and goings we observe in the three dimensions of day-to-day life might themselves be holographic projections of physical processes taking place on a distant, two-dimensional surface. In their new and peculiar-sounding vision, we and everything we do or see would be akin to holographic images.
