At least some media types noticed that such a claim is pretty far out:
Professor Brian Cox left This Morning viewers scratching their heads today after making a bizarre claim that humans ‘might be holograms’.
The British physicist, 53, appeared on the programme to promote his new live tour Horizons: A 2021 Space Odyssey, which will explore profound questions such as how the universe began.
While discussing the role of black holes in the evolution of the universe, Brian claimed the universe ‘might not be at all the way we perceive it to be’ and suggested we could all be holograms – but failed to elaborate before host Ruth Langsford moved the conversation on.
Monica Greep, “Professor Brian Cox baffles This Morning viewers with bizarre theory that the universe ‘may not be the way we perceive it to be’ and suggests all humans are actually HOLOGRAMS” at Daily Mail
Brian Cox, the “rock star scientist who made particle physics cool” may be par for the course now. Actually, for cosmology, he may be tame. The “science” we are all supposed to trust, as in “believe the science” features a good deal of this stuff now. Even the media are possibly beginning to wonder.
Sabine Hossenfelder offers some less far out thoughts:
This duality has been mathematically confirmed for some specific cases, but pretty much all string theorists seem to believe it is much more generally valid. In fact, a lot of them seem believe it is valid even in our universe, even though there is no evidence for that, neither observational nor mathematical. In this most general form, the duality is simply called the “holographic principle”.
If the holographic principle was correct, it would mean that the information about any volume in our universe is encoded on the boundary of that volume. That’s remarkable because naively, you’d think the amount of information you can store in a volume of space grows much faster than the information you can store on the surface. But according to the holographic principle, the information you can put into the volume somehow isn’t what we think it is. It must have more correlations than we realize. So it the holographic principle was true, that would be very interesting. I talked about this in more detail in an earlier video.
The holographic principle indeed sounds a little like optical holography. In both cases one encodes information about a volume on a surface with one dimension less. But if you look a little more closely, there are two important differences between the holographic principle and real holography:
Sabine Hossenfelder, “Is the universe REALLY a hologram?” at BackRe(Action) (March 27, 2021)
That sounds like a long circuit around “fashionable malarkey.”
Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd