Holography and Complementarity: Exploring the Entropy of Black Holes

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The chapter discusses the concept of holography and complementarity in relation to black holes, focusing on the surprising entropy of black holes being proportional to their area instead of volume. It explores the idea that the information inside a black hole can be fully described by the information at its two-dimensional boundary, comparing it to a hologram. The chapter also introduces the idea that the description of what's happening inside a black hole can be either by ordinary local quantum field theory or by degrees of freedom scattered across the event horizon, but not both at the same time.

I suspect most loyal Mindscape listeners have been exposed to the fact that I’ve written a new book, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. As I release this episode on Monday 9 September 2019, the book will officially be released tomorrow, in print, e-book, and audio versions. To get in the mood, we’ve had several podcast episodes on quantum mechanics, but the “emergence of spacetime” aspect has been neglected. So today we have a solo podcast in which I explain a bit about the challenges of quantum gravity, how Many-Worlds provides the best framework for thinking about quantum gravity, and how entanglement could be the key to showing how a curved spacetime could emerge from a quantum wave function. All of this stuff is extremely speculative, but I’m excited about the central theme that we shouldn’t be trying to “quantize gravity,” but instead looking for gravity within quantum mechanics. The ideas here go pretty far, but hopefully they should be accessible to everyone.

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The end of this episode includes a bonus, a short snippet from the audio book, read by yours truly. Audio excerpted courtesy Penguin Random House Audio. And here are links to some of the technical papers mentioned in the podcast.