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Yet another unexpected development emerged from this bizarre duality, called the holographic principle. Holograms are two-dimensional flat sheets of plastic, containing the image of three-dimensional objects that have been specially encoded within them. By shining a laser beam at the flat screen, the three-dimensional image suddenly emerges. In other words, all the information needed to create a three-dimensional image has been encoded onto a flat two-dimensional screen using lasers, like the image of Princess Leia projected by R2-D2 or the haunted mansion at Disneyland where three-dimensional ghosts sail around us. This principle also works for black holes. As we saw earlier, if we throw an encyclopedia into a black hole, the information contained inside the books cannot disappear, according to quantum mechanics. So where does the information go? One theory posits that it is distributed onto the surface of the event horizon of the black hole. So the two-dimensional surface of a black hole contains all the information of all the three-dimensional objects that have been thrown into it. This also has implications for our conception of reality. We are convinced, of course, that we are three-dimensional objects that can move in space, defined by three numbers, length, width, and height. But perhaps this is an illusion. Perhaps we are living in a hologram. Perhaps the three-dimensional world we experience is just a shadow of the real world, which is actually ten- or eleven-dimensional. When we move in the three dimensions of space, we experience our real selves actually moving in ten or eleven dimensions. When we walk down the street, our shadow follows us and moves like us, except the shadow exists in two dimensions. Likewise, perhaps we are shadows moving in three dimensions, but our real selves are moving in ten or eleven dimensions.
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