ONLY TREND-SUCKING DILETTANTES SWITCHED TO THINKING THE EARTH ROUND:

The thinking goes like this: Some distant two-dimensional surface contains all the data needed to fully describe our world -- and much like in a hologram, this data is projected to appear in three dimensions. Like the characters on a TV screen, we live on a flat surface that happens to look like it has depth.

It might sound absurd. But if when physicists assume it's true in their calculations, all sorts of big physics problems -- such as the nature of black holes and the reconciling of gravity and quantum mechanics -- become much simpler to solve. In short, the laws of physics seem to make more sense when written in two dimensions than in three.

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