The question opens simply: could all the information in your body right now, in principle, be recorded on a surface the size of your skin, rather than in your body's volume?
Intuition says no — a volume is far bigger than its surface. But the most persistent clue in gravitational physics over the past fifty years points the other way: gravity's ledger of information is kept on a surface. On September 25, Quanta Magazine's Qualia column ran a long-form piece with an honest title — *Gravity seems holographic*. That one word, "seems," deserves unpacking.
First, the classification: a column, not a new paper
The most common misreading should be cleared up first. Charlie Wood's piece is an opinion essay synthesizing classic work from the 1970s through the 1990s and two preprints. There is no new numerical validation and no new experiment. On Hacker News, someone bluntly asked whether this proved anything; the top-voted answer was a single word: No. It's worth reading because it retells the fifty-year thread of "why gravity looks holographic" clearly — and exposes the cracks in that thread.
What the fifty-year clue looks like
The story starts with black holes. In the 1970s, Bekenstein and Hawking computed something remarkable: black hole entropy is proportional not to volume but to the area of the event horizon. The container of stuff becomes its boundary — the first signal.
From 1993 to 1995, 't Hooft and Susskind promoted this to a principle: the full information of any gravitational system can be encoded on its boundary. Volume is appearance; the surface is the ledger. In 1997, Maldacena delivered the hardest evidence to date, the AdS/CFT correspondence: a higher-dimensional universe with gravity and a lower-dimensional quantum theory without gravity are mathematically the same thing. Commenters on HN called AdS/CFT essentially a mathematical fact — holography fits seamlessly within this specific type of universe.
But the crack is right there. AdS/CFT describes universes with a negative cosmological constant, whose boundary is like a shell around a ball. Our universe isn't that kind: it is accelerating outward, its cosmological constant is positive — technically, de Sitter space — and it has no boundary to use. Black hole entropy still holds in de Sitter, but that counts as indirect evidence. The "seems" in the article's title quantifies exactly this gap.
What's actually new
The column hangs on two preprints. One is Susskind's 2022 paper (arXiv:2209.09999), which uses scaling behavior to argue that de Sitter gravity is dual to a model called double-scaled SYK; the author himself describes it as parallel evidence for an existing conjecture. The other is Collier, Eberhardt and Mühlmann's 2025 paper (arXiv:2501.01486), later published in SciPost Physics: in a toy universe of 2+1 dimensions, pure de Sitter gravity is exactly dual to a matrix integral, and the entropy counted from the matrix's degrees of freedom lands precisely on the Gibbons-Hawking entropy. The paper's own wording is "propose."
The direction is interesting enough to pause on. AdS/CFT compresses a volume onto its boundary; in these two works, the holographic ledger of a de Sitter universe is more radical — compressed onto a single quantum dot. To be clear, though: these are toy models in 2+1 dimensions, separated from our four-dimensional universe by countless technical chasms. The column's summary isn't inaccurate; what's easy to over-read is its atmosphere. This is not "our universe has been proven holographic" — it is the conjecture's front line advancing one square toward universes like ours.
The minority voices, fully recorded
The most valuable part of the article is how thoroughly it documents the skeptics. Latham Boyle of the University of Edinburgh doesn't dispute the Bekenstein-Hawking calculation but rejects the holographic interpretation: wrapping a region yields two kinds of entropy, one from area and energy, one from quantum entanglement — and they are not the same thing. He says he's looking for a less mystical, more grounded reading, while also conceding AdS/CFT itself — he says he doesn't know any ordinary way to explain it. Charles Cao of Virginia Tech stands on the other side, quoted as saying we are "fooled" into thinking there is more stuff in the universe than there actually is. Sebastian Mizera of Columbia found the column's chess analogy too weak — his words: more like checkers and basketball.
The HN comment section contributed the article's best teaching moment. When someone scoffed that "surface determines interior" is nothing special, they were promptly corrected by classical physics: for a spherical shell of unknown charge density, the external electric field is identical everywhere, and the interior distribution can never be inferred from the surface; Birkhoff's theorem guarantees that stars with different density profiles produce exactly the same external gravitational field. In classical physics, the surface never determines the interior. That's precisely what's anomalous about holographic gravity — it is the first serious candidate in the physical world suggesting "interior reconstructible from surface."
The name left out
One more pointed criticism appeared on HN: Maldacena's name never appears in the piece. The three original AdS/CFT papers are cited; the person is not named. One commenter quipped that this is string theory popularization repackaged with the word "strings" deleted. Another criticized the article's explanation of Hawking radiation for using the particle-pair picture — the cartoon of an escaping positive particle and an infalling negative one — an image that circulates too widely in pop-science and is not physically accurate; the radiation arises from quantum field effects outside the horizon.
Having a popularizer's editorial choices audited item by item by readers is itself a signal: this thread's audience has matured to the point of reading the footnotes.
To close. Gravity *looks* holographic — looks, not is. Mathematically, in one class of universe the equation fits seamlessly; physically, the one we live in hasn't been verified, and what we hold is area entropy and two preprints stamped with "propose." Fifty years on, this clue has been neither confirmed nor refuted — each time it is approached, it throws off more anomalies. Anomalies are good. The lesson of physics is: the longer an anomaly holds, the bigger the explosion when it breaks.