CFT Creatures in a Three Dimensional Universe?

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Kressy: There shouldn't be a twin paradox that lots of things are not like what we experience in every day. We live in one of these boxy ADS universes because, you know, you could put our galaxy there and just don't put any of the other stuff - it would have made absolutely no difference for the evolution of humans. And now we look at our universe and we discover, oh, it's anti-decider space. Kressy: Bingo, we got super lucky. We already have a quantum gravity theory. Wouldn't that be nice?

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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