The Status of General Relativity Is Not Like Ptolemy or Kepler

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I don't think Newton could have gone from Ptolemy to his force law that tells you why the planets move like that around the sun. Once you had Kepler, first of all, the refinement that it's not just circles but ellipses,. It's much easier to figure out what is making the planets do that thing. And I don't think that the status of general relativity is any different fundamentally from the status of PtoleMY or of Kepler. The theory explains a lot more things with fewer ingredients and it's still alive.

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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