3:30–4:30 pm
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New surprises from the gravitational path integral
Ahmed Almheiri, IAS
Host: TBA
The gravitational path integral has been a constant source of surprising insights despite it being poorly understood. One gets a handle on it by approximating the integral with a sum over saddle-point configurations that represent different semi-classical spacetimes with fluctuating quantum fields. Some of these configurations include spacetime wormholes that connect together different parts of spacetime, and which have recently been shown to grant gravity the knowledge of things it ought not to know about. For instance, they predict that closed universes have a one dimensional Hilbert space, that information that falls into a black hole can be recovered from the Hawking radiation, that gravity implements quantum error correction, that gravity is holographic, and that it can do all this while also doing your taxes. I will go over these recent advances and discuss which of these only a(n April's) fool would believe.