Then you usually forget about it and go back to playing browser games until lunchtime rolls around. But those big questions, starting with the nature of the universe and leading all the way up to why you're sitting there reading boner jokes on a website, are being answered by science as we speak. And the theories they've come up with will leave your brain feeling like it has been drop-kicked over a goal post.

At some point in your life you have, at some completely random moment, stopped what you were doing and just thought, "Man, what am I doing here? How does any of this even exist? What is reality, anyway?"

5 The Universe Is a Hologram

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Let's start from the beginning: the entire universe and all life as we know it.

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Of course we've all heard about the big-bang theory (even if we keep picturing it wrong), but just like the show bearing its name, the science community has gotten tired of that old shit and wants to talk about something else. Like, "What if all reality is just a gigantic hologram projected on a 2-D surface?"

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Come quick! World War II is on!

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The Theory:

For the moment, we're going to pretend that we actually have the ability to explain this in a way that is not insane.

Back in Einstein's day, Big Al and his colleagues discovered a problem: The laws of physics didn't seem to work once you got on a subatomic scale. In fact, even today, no one has been able to marry Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum physics, and not for lack of trying. One attempt you might have heard of is string theory, which simply suggests that once you get smaller than an atom, everything is a string. Specifically, a 2-D unit called a quantum string. So far, so good? FANTASTIC.

Lunch

Above: String theory. Apparently.

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Now. String theorists think that everything we see, feel, hear, touch, taste and screw is nothing more than the vibration of those strings, a theory so far out there that string theorists are known as the Cheeches and Chongs of the physics world. Holographic universers took that theory further by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, everything we feel, hear, touch, taste and screw could be a 3-D projection of cosmic data encoded on a 2-D surface.