The Importance of Holography in Theory

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Holography has been the talk of the town in theoretical physics for 25 years, right? Yeah. It's been mostly practiced in highly idealized abstract, non-realistic mathematical situations that have nothing to do with ours. But there's a general lesson behind holography, which is we're finding out how quantum theory and gravity can finally work together more or less harmoniously. The clearest example perhaps is the case of a black hole. We've seen images of a black holes. That's all very nice. And a black hole is something very gravitation. I did the space time is curved, highly curved. Einstein says there is a surface, there is a horizon

Is there a multiverse, and if so, how should we think of ourselves within it? In many modern cosmological models, the universe includes more than one realm, with possibly different laws of physics, and these realms may or may not include intelligent observers. There is a longstanding puzzle about how, in such a scenario, we should calculate what we, as presumably intelligent observers ourselves, should expect to see. Today's guest, Thomas Hertog, is a physicist and longstanding collaborator of Stephen Hawking. They worked together (often with James Hartle) to address these questions, and the work is still ongoing.

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Thomas Hertog received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven. His new book is On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory.

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