One thing that we might do is seek new principles that we've discovered through our investigations up to this point. One such principle is the holographic principle. The holographic principle comes out of our perplexing discovery that the amount of information that can be stored in a region is proportional to the area of the region's boundary rather than its volume. It is consistent with the results of black hole thermodynamics, loop quantum gravity, and string theories and might be the first principle that only makes sense in the context of a quantum theory of gravity.

I have written out two alternative versions of the holographic principle. No one knows which, if either, is correct.

The strong holographic principle says that our 4-dimensional spacetime is really 3-dimensional. All phenomena in the universe can really be represented as 3-dimensional processes.

Under the weak holographic principle, spacetime comprises all of the channels of communication that convey information between observers and geometry is a measure of the capacities of boundaries to transmit information. This is the ultimate realization of the idea that the universe is a network of relationships.