Changing the Theory of Gravity

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In general relativity, what matters is the amount of energy at each point. But you're imagining changing it so that what matters is not just how much energy there is at each point, but how it's distributed. And then that's a kind of a radical imagination of how to change gravity. So I wanted to take it back to this finite versus infinite question, because secretly there's a relationship to the cosmological constant. You talked about holography and the information in a black hole,. We talked about there's a cosmological Constant that is accelerating the universe apart. There's reason to believe the universe has a finite set of information in it., Because there's a horizon around

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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