Scientists have found that the holographic principle works well when looking back at data from almost 14 billion years ago. The theory resolves the black hole information paradox within string theory.
Theoretical physicists and astrophysicists analyzed cosmic radiation from the Big Bang and mapped it out with unprecedented accuracy. This research supports the idea that the entire universe can be thought of as a two-dimensional structure. The three dimensions we experience are only an effective at our, smaller, scale.
At this point, it's all mathematics and the scientists can't really find the words to envision it either.
"Even the scientists who worked on this for the past 20 years don't have the right tools or the right language to describe what's going on." - Professor Kostas Skenderis
The theory was first proposed by physicist Leonard Susskind in the 1990s. He research suggested that many laws of physics can be described mathematically using two dimensions, not three.
If you want to test your brain with straight up science, here's the abstract from the study.
"We test a class of holographic models for the very early Universe against cosmological observations and find that they are competitive to the standard cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant (ΛCDM) of cosmology. These models are based on three-dimensional perturbative superrenormalizable quantum field theory (QFT), and, while they predict a different power spectrum from the standard power law used in ΛCDM, they still provide an excellent fit to the data (within their regime of validity). By comparing the Bayesian evidence for the models, we find that ΛCDM does a better job globally, while the holographic models provide a (marginally) better fit to the data without very low multipoles (i.e., l≲30), where the QFT becomes nonperturbative. Observations can be used to exclude some QFT models, while we also find models satisfying all phenomenological constraints: The data rule out the dual theory being a Yang-Mills theory coupled to fermions only but allow for a Yang-Mills theory coupled to nonminimal scalars with quartic interactions. Lattice simulations of 3D QFTs can provide nonperturbative predictions for large-angle statistics of the cosmic microwave background and potentially explain its apparent anomalies."
What does this make you think about reality and our dimension?