Smattering said:
Is this the modern physics version of Plato's Cave?
Well, In a way, yes. Although it would be sort of the opposite. Let's say you and I are chained up in that cave, we would see not shadows on the wall, but we would see a picture of reality "as it is" on the surface (humans walking around, flowers, trees etc...)
but what's really on the surface, would be a world of shadows, and mixed up random noise. It would literally be that weird.
The holographic theory is a bit more abstract then that, but essentially the holographic principle states that all 3 dimensional information can be described by 2 dimensional information located on the boundary's of that 3 dimensional system. For example, let us take the house you are currently reading this PF forum on. everything in front of you, behind you, even inside of you, can be described by a set of "voxels", which is essentially the volume of the house your in.
But all the information needed to describe you and everything in that house, can
also be described by the "pixels" on the surface of the house's interior walls. or rather, the surface area.
This is basically the behavior Black holes exhibit upon current theoretical deconstruction of how they absorb matter, and we figure that if it applies to black-holes, it could indeed apply to everything. When matter falls into a black-hole, it's information content is smeared out across the entire horizon. sort of like white noise, randomly distributed across it's surface.