Daniel Harlow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, and the Emergence of Space and Time
Quantum mechanics is the theory which governs the behavior of matter at the atomic scale, but so far we have not succeeded in making it compatible with gravity. This tension is highlighted by Stephen Hawking's famous "black hole information paradox", which argues that any self-consistent combination of quantum mechanics and gravity must violate some fundamental principle of physics. In recent years consensus has been building that the principle which must be given up is the existence of spacetime as a fundamental entity: instead space and time are emergent notions, valid only in certain situations and only in some approximation. What does it mean for space and time to be emergent? When can they fail to emerge and how badly? In this talk I will give a broad overview of these ideas, building towards recent developments which put the emergence of spacetime on a firm mathematical footing by relating it to ideas from the theory of quantum computation.
Daniel Harlow is an Associate Professor of Physics at MIT, working on quantum aspects of black holes and cosmology. He grew up in some combination of Cincinnati, Boston, and Chicago, and attended Columbia University (BA) and Stanford University (PhD). Harlow received the New Horizons in Physics Prize in 2019 "for fundamental insights about quantum information, quantum field theory, and gravity.” He is an avid hiker and pianist.