Physicists and cosmologists are always trying to crack the origins of our universe. While the Big Bang theory is probably the best attempt at explaining it, some Japanese physicists now offer a different answer: the universe may well be a hologram projected from a lower-dimensional universe.

The theory can be explained in simple terms akin to a hologram on a credit card. Professor Kostas Skenderis at the University of Southampton had this to say earlier in 2013.

“The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card, but now it is the entire Universe that is encoded in such a fashion.”

How to get from nothing to something has baffled both scientists and religious people for as long as they have been wondering about our origins. Scientists believe the answer could be found by studying the properties of black holes while religious people offer up God as a timeless, other-dimensional kind of entity that decided to create the Universe in six days.

So, the Japanese scientists formed two separate calculations; one showed the internal energy of a black hole and other properties connected to it. The other dealt with the internal energy of a lower-dimensional cosmos. After all numbers were crunched, the researchers noticed that the two calculations matched.

Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California, was privy to both computations and verified that they were both correct.

“They (the Japanese scientists) 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,” Susskind said.

In 1997, physicist Juan Maldacena was the first who proposed that the hologram theory could work with conventional physics. He suggested that the universe comprised of infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings from which gravity arises and that these strings were simply a hologram projected from a flat cosmos where there’s no gravity.

According to mathematical equations calculated in the Japanese study, there are indications that Maldacena’s ideas could be true. We may very well live out our lives on a 3D print on a credit card.

Christmas is upon us, so expect that our universe credit card will be swiped a lot over the coming weeks. Let’s all pray our card won’t be rejected.