How Many States Does a Black Hole Have?

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There has to be enough room in the black hole. You can't transfer the information. And entropy has to go up. So that's an example of the holographic principle at work. It's surprising not only because it's again weird that gravity knows something about the quantum states of matter. The statement is just true. But also it's surprising because you would have thought that the amount of information you can have in a region should grow like the volume, not like the area. If I make a heap of computer chips that each store a gigabyte of data or something, then the volume of the heap tells me how much information is stored rather than its surface.

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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