Do We Have a Finite Number of Degrees of Freedom?

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In anti-decidorspace, the universe with a positive cosmological constant becomes like a box. The horizon has a finite area around us. In quantum field theories naturally have an infinite number of degrees of freedom. And so if that's our future, if our future is, we empty out and we have a horizon around us with a finite number of degree of freedom, we have a finite entropy. Do you think this could be the kind of quantum gravity we should be looking for? "Yes," he says.

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.