In 1974, a young physicist named Jacob Bekenstein made an unusual career move. Two years after completing a doctoral thesis at Princeton that would eventually reshape modern physics, he immigrated to Israel and took a position at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, the youngest university in the country. The thesis had proposed something that most of his colleagues considered foolhardy: that black holes possess entropy, and that this entropy is proportional not to their volume but to the area of their event horizon. Stephen Hawking thought it was wrong. He set out to disprove it and ended up confirming it instead. The consequences of that confirmation have not finished arriving.

Bekenstein’s insight, refined over four decades at Ben Gurion and then the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, seeded one of the deepest ideas in modern physics: the holographic principle. All the information contained within a volume of space, the principle states, can be fully described by data encoded on the surface enclosing it. The three dimensional world you see around you may be, in some precise and mathematical sense, a projection from a two dimensional boundary. Reality is a hologram, and the seed of the proof was planted in the Negev.

This matters because it reopens a question that physics spent most of the twentieth century trying to close.

Are we living on an atom?

The........

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