The Entropy of a Black Hole

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Entropy is a way of measuring how many different microscopic states correspond to a kind of macroscopic configuration. So the larger the entropy, the more quantum states you're dealing with. More recently, we've figured out a way to calculate how many quantum states a black hole has when I know a lot more about it. And so that really is an incredibly profound thing to know about black holes, which we've never done any experiments on directly.

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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