Quantum Gravity Is Not a String Theory, Is It?

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I want to say this without diminishing string theory in any way, but the kind of progress that we're making right now could have, in principle, happened entirely without knowing anything about string theory. I'm trying to say that you and your friends are doing quantum gravity in a way that is not in opposition to string theory, but is also not built upon string theory. Now, for historical reasons, string theory does exist, and it's given us very powerful tools. But as a matter of principle, the properties that gravity has that allow you to do this are independent and maybe on some other planet, they're discovering that before they discover string theory. It doesn't mean there won't be

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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