The Entropy of a Black Hole

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Holography is the idea that you can have a theory of gravity in two dimensions. But there's no gravitational sort of, you're not doing Einstein's equations or anything like that. You're just describing the theory without gravity, but in one dimension less. Sean DeSina: Does this apply to our universe? Well we don't know if it does - what we do know is that there are examples of toy universes where these physical phenomena might occur," he says.

It’s a big universe we live in, so it comes as no surprise that big numbers are needed to describe it. There are roughly 10^22 stars in the observable universe, and about 10^88 particles altogether. But these numbers are nothing compared to some of the truly ginormous quantities that mathematicians have found to talk about, with inscrutable names like Graham’s Number and TREE(3). Could such immense numbers have any meaningful relationship with the physical world? In his recent book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, theoretical physicist Antonio Padilla explores both our actual universe and the abstract world of immense numbers, and finds surprising connections between them.

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Antonio (Tony) Padilla received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Durham. He is currently a Royal Society Research Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. He is a frequent contributor to the YouTube series Sixty Symbols and Numberphile.

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