A Two-Dimensional Universe?
This idea isn’t as crazy as it first appears, because we might actually have a working example of the holographic principle in action. It’s known by the rather awkward name of the AdS/CFT correspondence, and it was developed in 1997 by physicist Juan Maldacena.
To understand, let’s construct a special kind of universe with some strange properties. One, this universe has five spatial dimensions. Two, it’s completely empty of matter and radiation. Three, it contains a persistent cosmological force that bends it inward. This kind of spacetime is called a (five-dimensional) anti-de Sitter space.
Now, let’s say you’re trying to solve a very complicated problem within that universe, like how quantum gravity works. We’ve been trying to solve quantum gravity for almost a century now, and while we don’t have any answers yet, we do have a set of tools that we hope someday will lead us to one. That set of tools is known as string theory.

Let’s unpack some more complex concepts.
Quantum gravity is an understanding of gravity applied to the smallest things in the universe, such as subatomic particles. We can understand the behavior of these particles using quantum mechanics, but when gravity becomes strong, like inside of black holes, our theories break down. Quantum gravity is an attempt to fix those broken theories.
Quantum fields are entities that soak the entire universe. When patches of the fields are energized, we see the creation of particles or the exchange of forces.
Conformal field theory is a type of quantum field theory that has certain special mathematical properties. These kinds of theories have limited applications in some high-energy physics experiments, but are not very useful outside of that.
Maldacena discovered that you can transform this problem—the problem of how to solve for quantum gravity in this weird universe—into a completely different problem living on its four-dimensional boundary. After you make that transformation, all the gravity goes away, replaced with a special kind of quantum theory known as a conformal field theory (which is the CFT part of the correspondence). By now, we’ve become extremely adept at solving quantum field theory problems, and we have a whole host of well-tested tools for working through those kinds of mathematics.
Maldacena performed the theoretical physics equivalent of a magic trick: he was able to take a problem that we don’t know how to solve (quantum gravity with string theory) and transform it into one that we can solve (a conformal field theory with quantum fields).