IFT Colloquium: Matthew Headrick (Brandeis & IHES)

Venue&Time: Blue Room / 15:00

Coffee will be served in the cafeteria at 16:15h

Title: ‘Black holes, quantum entanglement, and the geometry of spacetime’

Speaker: Matthew Headrick (Brandeis & IHES)

Abstract: Black holes are by far the most entropic objects in the universe, and their enormous entropy directly connects the macroscopic world governed by general relativity to the Planck scale governed by quantum gravity. It turns out that they are just a piece of a much larger and richer story, hinting that, despite the notorious difficulty of quantizing gravity, quantum mechanics and general relativity are actually two sides of the same coin. I’ll explain these connections, and along the way try to answer the question: Is Newton’s constant really equal to 1?