Topics: Science, World News
Everything in the universe 'is a giant holographic projection' sounds like the sort of thing you'd hear in The Matrix.
But there are scientists out there who wholeheartedly believe that space isn't just a giant 3D box filled with stuff.
Instead, we could be living in a world where everything is projected - known as the 'holographic universe theory'.
The holographic universe theory suggests that our entire universe is a giant hologram. This means that the reality we experience may be a 3D projection of information stored on a 2D surface.
So, a hologram is a two-dimensional image that looks three-dimensional when viewed correctly.
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It's like when you look at a credit card on a flat surface, it appears to have depth. And the theory says something similar might be happening with our universe.
In the '70s, the black hole information paradox was born after Stephen Hawking theorised that black holes emit radiation that carried 'no information', according to Live Science, which eventually causes them to disappear.
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However, this meant that scientists didn't know where all the information about the stuff that fell in to the black hole went. In physics, information isn’t supposed to be destroyed.
That's when physicists Gerard 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind theorised that the information isn’t actually lost, but is stored on the surface of the black hole at its event horizon, not inside it.
After this potential revelation, it was suggested that maybe all the information in the universe is stored on a 2D surface somewhere, and what we see and experience in 3D is a sort of projection, just like a hologram.
Professor Marika Taylor, a theoretical physicist from the University of Birmingham, said that the universe should be thought of as a hollow ball.
The galaxies are contained inside of the ball, but the structure of the surface has two dimensions.
"It is very hard to visualise this. However, it is also quite hard to visualise what happens inside an atom," the researcher told the Daily Mail.
"We learned in the early twentieth century that atoms follow quantum rules, which are also quite different from our everyday reality.
"Holography takes us into an even more extreme world, where not only are the forces quantum in nature, but the number of dimensions is different from our perceived reality."
Even though this is just a theory, I hope The Matrix fans aren't getting carried away.
Professor Taylor remind us: "The Matrix movies are very thought-provoking but probably don't quite capture all the ideas in holography."
