"[F]or a physicist, the upper limit to entropy... is a critical, almost sacred quantity. ...the Bekenstein and Hawking result tells us that a theory that includes gravity is, in some sense, simpler than a theory that doesn't. ...If the maximum entropy in any given region of space is proportional to the region's surface area and not its volume, then perhaps the true, fundamental degrees of freedom—the attributes that have the potential to give rise to that disorder—actually reside on the region's surface and not within its volume. Maybe... the universe's physical processes take place on a thin, distant surface that surrounds us, and all we see and experience is merely a projection of those processes. Maybe... the universe is rather like a hologram."