Holographic principle or Maldacena's duality is a theory that says that the volume of space can be described by just looking the information encoded on a boundary to the region of that space.
Holography uses light to recreate the three dimensional objects by scattering it off their surfaces (therefore using the information of the boundary of the object to recreate it in a sense).
Recently I read that a group of Japanese scientists gave numerical calculations that support the idea of the holographic principle (you need to google: 'simulations back up theory that universe is a hologram', nature doesn't allow linking without paying).
Since then all I've seen in the news is this (paraphrasing):
"We all live in a hologram" ; "We are not real" ; etc.
You get the picture.
Now, I may not have really big knowledge of these topics, but isn't this kinda wrong? I mean, yes, theories of duality tells us that we can extract a lot of information of the space time purely from looking at the boundary of it (especially if the space time is asymptotically flat). But other than that, there doesn't seem to be much contact points between these two terms.
Or am I wrong?
I was under the impression that the holographic principle is just one of the theories that could be used to understand the quantum aspect of gravity. So how would that mean that we live in a hologram or that we are holograms?
A lot of people are also claiming this, and this kinda grinds my gears since they have no background in physics (quite in fact they have no connection to physics and don't understand the mathematics that stand underneath it all), and are seemingly making these pompous claims.
How would you explain this?