ADS-CFT - Is There a Positive Cosmological Constant?

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Modern theoretical physics has to grapple with this fact that we know so much about the counterfactual case with a negative cosmological constant in ADS-CFT. In our universe, it's not clear whether such a thing exists and what it would be. I guess nature doesn't like to throw us off balls. It's extremely unlikely that our universe is fundamentally of the type where you have a positive cosmological Constant forever.

Stephen Hawking’s discoveries of black hole radiation, entropy, and the information-loss problem have both taught us an enormous amount about the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity, and also left us with some knotty puzzles. One major insight is the holographic principle: the information describing a black hole can be thought of as living on the event horizon (the two-dimensional boundary of the hole), rather than distributed throughout its volume, as normal physics would lead us to expect. Raphael Bousso has made important contributions to our understanding of holography and its implications. We talk about the modern point of view of how gravity relates to quantum mechanics.

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Raphael Bousso received his Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University, where his advisor was Stephen Hawking. He is currently a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He has made pioneering contributions to our understanding of black hole information, the holographic principle, the string theory landscape, and multiverse cosmology.

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