Some observations on the degrees of freedom of quantum gravity

Higgs Centre colloquium

Some observations on the degrees of freedom of quantum gravity

  • Event time: 1:00pm until 2:00pm
  • Event date: 28th October 2016
  • Speaker: Jan de Boer (University of Amsterdam)
  • Location: Higgs Centre Seminar Room, Room 4305,

Event details

Recent work has made it clear that gravity is an example of an emergent phenomenon: there exists a large number of strongly interacting, microscopic degrees of freedom and gravity is merely an approximate long-distance description of these degrees of freedom. The situation is somewhat analogous to thermodynamics, which is also an approximate description of the collective behavior of many microscopic degrees of freedom. I will describe some recent progress in this area, including possible implications for black hole physics, and tantalizing connections with notions originally developed in the context of quantum information theory.