The universe is a “vast and complex” hologram, according to scientists from the University of Southampton and colleagues in Canada and Italy. But fear not. It does not mean that we are all figments of an alien overlord’s dabbling with a mega-Imax projection system.

A hologram is a flat (two-dimensional) surface that, when viewed, appears to have a third dimension – in other words, it gives the illusion of having depth. The holographic principle suggests that the contents of the universe originate as mathematics encoded on a boundary surrounding the entire cosmos. If you’re struggling to picture that, just relax, because the scientists can’t quite envisage it either. They just know it works mathematically.

The theory was first proposed by physicist Leonard Susskind in the 1990s. He showed that many of the laws of physics can be described mathematically using two dimensions, rather than the three we experience. Cosmologists like this approach because it could help solve one of the biggest puzzles in physics: how gravity works on extremely small scales. Without this, physicists struggle to understand what happens inside a black hole, or what happened at the moment the universe came into existence.

According to previous theories, when matter falls into a black hole it is crushed out of existence. But how can something just vanish? It contradicts the principle that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Using the holographic principle, this paradox is solved because nothing is destroyed. The information contained in the matter is smeared across the black hole’s boundary. Again, no one knows what this means in reality; it just gets the sums right.

These latest results apply the holographic principle to the origin of the universe. Scientists have found that, mathematically, the holographic principle works well there, too. Now they have to figure out what that could mean for our understanding of the universe. Perhaps the simplest answer is that it is a giant pan-dimensional cinema after all.