Quote (Wew @ Feb 5 2014 04:36am)
Can someone dumb down the theory for me? I'm 100% ignorant when it comes to anything to do with science.
The holographic principle crudely put: it is possible to record the information content of any region of space, with 1's and 0's, written with one entry per Planck area on the boundary.
Even more crudely put: By only writing on the walls of a container it is possible to describe everything the container holds.
It is called the holographic because the similarities between this idea and a hologram. A hologram is a 2-d surface that contains the information needed to construct a 3-d space. This is where the "hologram analogy" starts and ends. There is no evidence we live in a hologram.
The fact that the holographic principle seems to be true, regardless of what you put into the container, what order you put stuff into the container, or how you put it into the container; is
thought to be a clue to a way to quantize gravity. Or in other words: the quantum theory of gravity (currently unknown) should generate the holographic principle as a consequence (the holographic principle should be obvious to anyone who knows how to quantize gravity).