Holographic bound from second law of thermodynamics

A necessary condition for the validity of the holographic principle is the holographic bound the entropy of a system is bounded from above by a quarter of the area of a circumscribing surface measured in Planck areas. This bound cannot be derived at present from consensus fundamental theory. We show with suitable gedanken experiments that the holographic bound follows from the generalized second law of thermodynamics for both generic weakly gravitating isolated systems and for isolated, quiescent and nonrotating strongly gravitating configurations well above Planck mass. These results justify Susskind's early claim that the holographic bound can be gotten from the second law. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.