The AdS/CFT correspondence for political scientists

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In a vastly oversimplified nutshell:

String theories are theoretical physics frameworks in which particles
have one dimension ("strings") instead of zero-dimensions ("points").
The different particles we observe arise from these strings being in
different quantum states. In order to be consistent with quantum
mechanics, string theories require the existence of higher dimensions,
beyond the classical 3 spatial and 1 temporal dimensions. (The original
bosonic string theory postulated 26 dimensions; superstring theories use
10; M-theory, the new hotness, has 11.)

String theories have a property called the holographic principle, which
says that the information contained in a volume of spacetime can be
perfectly encoded on its boundary, which necessarily has fewer
dimensions than the volume itself.

Maldacena's conjecture realizes this principle by considering a specific
mathematical model of spacetime known as anti-de Sitter space. He
postulates that physical descriptions and predictions made using
M-theory in anti-de Sitter space can be expressed using quantum field
theory in the context of the space's boundary. Since an problem that is
intractable in M-theory might be tractable in quantum field theory (and
vice versa), physicists would be able to translate problems between the
two contexts and use whichever framework made the most sense.

The cosmological angle is that the universe might actually be a hologram
- a lower-dimensional object that merely describes a higher-dimensional
one.