Gravity Is Being Special Again

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Our most fundamental theories tell us that there's just no limit at all on how much information you can store in any region of spacetime. And also just the very simple fact that it's a finite number, has a finite number of bits of information which you would not have guessed from any non gravitational quantum field theory. Gravity is again being special. We don't know how to do it but compared to accessing all these would be tiny regions in which we can store information, it's actually much easier to make a black hole.

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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