That space could have such a profound influence on the essence of reality could perhaps not have been imagined at the beginning of science. We reached much since the beginning of science, but the journey that began with Isaac Newton's ideas of space is far from over. The stuff the cosmos is made of could hold far more surprises than we ever dreamed of.
Let us take for example you. You actually seem quite real, don't you? And yet there are surprising new hints that everything, from us humans to the room itself, could in reality be nothing more than a kind of hologram. Everything we see and experience and what is part of our familiar three-dimensional reality could be a projection of information stored on a thin distant two-dimensional surface.
Just as the information for a hologram is stored on a thin piece of plastic, such as holograms on credit cards, so all the information in the universe could be a hologram on the surface of a 2D universe. This is one of the most profound corrections of our idea of space and reality.
The evidence for this is based on very special objects in space: black holes! This theory is new and hard to accept. Modern theories about black holes say that reality is two-dimensional. We and that our three-dimensional world is only a kind of hologram at the border of space. There are physicists who consider these and such other theories to be absolutely crazy.
An example: What would happen if you threw a wallet into a black hole?
It used to be assumed that nothing, not even the light, could escape the powerful attraction of a black hole, but today it seems that this view is no longer quite right. Scientists working on the mathematics of black holes have recently made a strange discovery. As the wallet disappears into the black hole, a copy of all the information it contains is apparently being made and stored on the surface of the black hole. Similar to data storage in a computer, the wallet exists in two places. A forever lost three-dimensional version inside the black hole and a two-dimensional version of the information on the surface. The information content of everything that has fallen into this black hole is, so to speak, reproduced on its surface. Everything that happens in the black hole can be read on the outside.
Theoretically one could use the information outside on the surface the black hole to reconstruct a wallet and every amazing detail. The space inside the black hole is subject to the same laws as the space outside the black hole or anywhere else in the universe. So if an object in the black hole can be described by information on its surface, it could be that everything in the universe, from galaxies and stars to humans and space itself, is just a projection of information stored on a distant two-dimensional surface surrounding us.
In other words: What we experience as reality could be a kind of hologram? That would mean that our three-dimensional world is an illusion projected as a hologram. Maybe one could say now, Yes, the three-dimensional world is a kind of illusion and the actual reality is the two-dimensional reality and it is on the surface of the universe, like we were on the surface of a screen. This theory is so new that physicists are still trying to understand it. But if it is right, we would be facing a revolution in our idea of space. That would be more dramatic than all the changes brought about by Newton and Einstein.
Although space is an essential part of our everyday lives, it remains a kind of familiar stranger to us. It is everywhere around us, but we are still far from understanding its true nature. This could take another 100 or 1000 years or it can happen even tomorrow. And if we solve this riddle, we will come a huge step closer to the substance of the cosmos.
