As I understand it, this paper is novel because it has found a scenario, a set of rules, where the math shows that the universe could indeed work this way...but this particular set of rules doesn't seem to be the ones we see in this universe. (I'll get to the specifics in a moment)

Why is this still useful? Because it is a starting point, a model that confirms the theory is workable. If the result had been negative, then some parts of the theory could be ruled out.

Now to the specifics from the original paper's abstract:

> We study this issue in the context of gravity with a negative cosmological constant. We exploit the most basic example of the holographic description of gravity (AdS/CFT): type IIB string theory on AdS5×S5, equivalent to maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. We thus resolve a long-standing question: Does the four-dimensional N=4 SU(N) Super-Yang-Mills theory on S3 at large N contain enough states to account for the entropy of rotating electrically charged supersymmetric black holes in 5D anti–de Sitter space? Our answer is positive.

Lots of words. A few things to take away is that this paper talks about a universe with four spatial dimensions, not three, and it considers "anti-de Sitter space", which would be a universe that loops back on itself instead of being infinite and flat as our universe appears to be. Last thing is that because the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, the cosmological constant is probably greater than zero but this theory only considers a scenario where the cosmological constant is negative.