Definition: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: In an absurd twist to everything you know and love, physicists tackling what sounds like a question for the chronically stoned—"What if the entire universe is just one big hologram?"—have come to a tenuous conclusion that, yeah, that might actually be the case. 
  
 The initial hologram-universe theory was proposed in 1997 and claimed that the universe is made of vibrating strings in ten dimensions. But since fundamental forces complicate everything, the universe in which we think we live is really just a projection of a true reality with fewer dimensions and no gravity. (Confused yet? It gets better.) 
  
 Despite seeming batshit crazy, the projection theory proved to be a surprise hit among scientists, as it seems to resolve differences between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. But as shiny as the theory is, it lacked proof—until now. 
  
 Despite not being hard evidence, the journal Nature calls new work on the theory "compelling evidence" for the idea that we're all just living in a giant holodeck. A group of scientists at Ibaraki University in Japan has released two papers on similar topics. One measures the internal energy, entropy, event horizon, and a bunch of other properties of a black hole according to classic, hologram-less string theory. The other measures the internal energy according to the rules of the mirror-universe-that-really-might-be-the-actual-universe. 
  
 They got the same results. 
  
 Make of the findings what you will. We'll just be over here having an existential crisis. 
  
 [image via Getty] ||||| Artist's impression by Markus Gann/Shutterstock 
  
 A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection. 
  
 In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed1 that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity. 
  
 Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa (see 'Collaborative physics: String theory finds a bench mate'). But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive. 
  
 In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true. 
  
 In one paper2, Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence (see 'Astrophysics: Fire in the Hole!'). In the other3, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match. 
  
 “It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and who did not contribute to the team's work. 
  
 Regime change 
  
 The findings “are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory”, Maldacena adds. The two papers, he notes, are the culmination of a series of articles contributed by the Japanese team over the past few years. “The whole sequence of papers is very nice because it tests the dual [nature of the universes] in regimes where there are no analytic tests.” 
  
 “They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes. 
  
 Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another. 
  
 Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory. |||||
Output:
Prepare for a head trip: The universe may actually be a hologram and everything you see an illusion, according to new research that could prove gravity comes from thin, vibrating strings—holograms of events in a simpler, flatter cosmos. It was an idea first put forth by physicist Juan Maldacena in 1997, but never tested until now. Japanese researchers now have mathematical evidence, via two studies on black holes, that this hologram theory may in fact be right. If proven, it would solve inconsistencies in Einstein's theory of gravity, and be a "solid footing" for string theory, Nature reports. The Daily Mail likens the theory to the security chip on your credit card: It's a 2D surface that has all the data needed to describe a 3D object. Basically, all the information about our universe is stored in a flattened version that projects everything we see. Trippy, right? The new research shows "that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe," says physicist Leonard Susskind, but the universes explored by the team don't look like our own, Maldacena notes. Still, it does show hope that our universe can be explained by a similar theory, he adds. Or as Gawker puts it, "Make of the findings what you will. We'll just be over here having an existential crisis."