Is There an Infinite Hilbert Space?

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Rafael Buso: I don't know if you're going to make it very far in physics with this sort of humble attitude that, you know, there are some questions you don't know the answer to. So therefore, you would say you're happiest with the idea that there are an infinite number of possible quantum states in the universe. But now we're on a much less constrained territory where it's harder to be sure about how it plays out,.

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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