The Relationship Between Gravity, General Relativity, and String Theory

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Rafael Buso: I started out going into physics, just sort of vaguely wanting to know about fundamental stuff. He says he learned fairly soon that it's those two big developments of the early 20th century that we haven't managed to fit together yet. "I don't think quantum mechanics could have ever been discovered the way that Einstein did discover his stuff"

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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