“The new techniques do not directly investigate the idea of the universe as a holographic projection,” Rinaldi said in an email. “If a black hole can be described by the holographic duality, then we believe that the gravity in our entire universe could be also described by holography.”

“However, this last step is still under intense research and it is not directly related to the techniques we presented,” he noted. “Our techniques make difficult computations possible and provide tools to test the idea that the universe is a hologram in the future.”

To that point, Rinaldi and his colleagues employ so-called “matrix models” to examine the mysterious behavior of gravity at quantum scales, known as quantum gravity. The researchers believe that these computational techniques could become “the new Swiss army knife” of quantum gravity studies, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal PRX Quantum.