"Holographic" Universe?

There's a recent article that I've seen circulating around Google+, namely:

Simulations back up the theory that Universe is a hologram, Published on Nature.com, Dec. 10, 2013.

This is a bit of a synchronicity for me in some ways as I've been revisiting some ideas regarding notions of a "holographic" universe and, indeed, have been planning on doing some review/analysis here on Drifting Labyrinths of a few YouTube videos on the subject, which I have watched this past week. But this is an aside--now let's get to the matter at hand.

I've seen some comments regarding this article, and I think that some people misunderstand what the article is actually saying. It does not say that we are living in a hologram and it certainly does not say we are living in something that is similar to The Matrix. What it does say is that certain interpretations of string theory--ones which use nine spatial dimensions with one dimension of time (for a total of ten dimensions)--can be seen as a projection, or "hologram," of a specific sort of one dimensional model of quantum mechanics. From the article:

The mathematically intricate world of strings...would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

and the article later says of this "simpler flatter universe":

The lower-dimensional, gravity-free [universe] has but a single dimension and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.

What some people seem to miss in the article is where theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena is paraphrased as saying:

Neither of these model universes...resembles our own.

What the article is actually reporting on is the fact that there are problems/solutions which are translatable from the more complicated and thus, mathematically more difficult, ten dimensional model of superstrings to this simpler one dimensional model. In the article, these problems and solutions concern properties of certain kinds of black holes.

Now, the fact that a specific one dimensional model has some sort of equivalency with a ten dimensional model does not seem particularly surprising in this instance: in string theory the strings themselves are seen to be one dimensional objects and these one dimensional objects are "vibrating" in the ten dimensions. It seems at least intuitively possible that a simplified model of the ten dimensions of certain formulations of string theory would be able to be expressed in a single dimension--perhaps not much differently from how we can think of and express four dimensional "light cones" in two dimensions, how we can explore four dimensional geometry by the projection of four dimensional objects onto a two dimensional surface, or how we create a three dimensional visual experience from the two dimensional representation of images on our retinas. What I am getting at here is that it seems there are several instances of translating phenomena from such and such a dimensional configuration to another, and so, it's not like such translations are something new.

Moreover, it's not like the discoveries reported in this article are conclusive that certain ten dimensional string theories are entirely translatable into this specific one dimensional model. As the article itself says the research being reported upon is not a proof but provides "...compelling evidence that Maldacena's conjecture is true."

What was this conjecture? It's not that we are living in a hologram or The Matrix that's for sure; rather, the conjecture is that there exists a model of the universe such that a "...model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin vibrating strings [i.e., in the context of the content of the research reported on in the article, specific models of ten dimensional string theory] could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics [and this would be, apparently, the physics of the one dimensional model reported on in the article]". In other words, the "compelling" evidence is in regards to the fact that there is a simplified model of a more complex model.

And that's the so-called "rub" here: we are talking about models of the universe and not the universe itself. Pretty much by definition all models are going to be simplified versions of whatever it is the model is modeling. Further, since all these models in current physics are essentially mathematical in nature, I can't help but think that any model is going to run up against some problematic manifestation similar to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, by which I mean that, for any given model of the universe, it will be impossible for it to be both complete and consistent. Put differently, it seems likely that there will always be truths of the universe that are unable to be fully represented within a physical model of the universe.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.