The article Physicists Found Proof That the Universe is Built Like a Hologram, by Sarah Sloat, has distorted facts. She quotes Kostas Skenderis, one of the authors/researcher of the original article, in the third paragraph stating the he specifically says "The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in a hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire universe is encoded.” Sloat then says the researchers are suggesting that how we perceive the universe is actually two-dimensional and it is the information that makes us see in three-dimension. Reading and rereading the original article, I was unable to find that direct quote anywhere. Which means Sloat simple made it up so that the readers would be more interested in the article.
On the first page of the original article titled, From Planck data to Planck era: Observational test of Holographic Cosmology, Afshordi, Corianó, Rose, Gould, and Skenderis (2017) states, “We emphasise that the application of holography to cosmology is conjectural, the theoretical validity of such dualities is still open and different authors approach the topic in different ways.” Conjectural literally means, an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information. Granted, Sloat does say at the end of her article that the research is controversial and another author found the exact opposite. That is not necessarily a bad thing, since Afshordi et al. said it would be interesting to further analyze these models. Therefore, other researchers will help promote better empirical facts.
Afshordi et al. were testing a holographic universe but in their conclusion it says “... at very low multipoles the perturbative expansion breaks down and in this regime the prediction of the theory cannot be trusted”.
Afshordi, N., Corianó, C., Rose, L. D., Gould, E., and Skenderis, K. (2017). From planck data to planck era: observational tests of holographic cosmology. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.041301