General Physics Colloquium, Dr. Daniel Harlow, Princeton University.  Refreshments from 3:30-3:50 pm

Title:  Black Holes, Quantum Information, and the Emergence of Spacetime

Host:  Eanna Flanagan

Abstract:  In the last few years the black hole information problem has once again become a hot subject of research.  Hawking's original argument against the consistency of gravity and quantum mechanics has been recast as a fairly tight series of paradoxes, which indicate that the emergence of ordinary low energy physics from a theory of quantum gravity must be rather subtle.  In this talk I will review the simplest of these paradoxes, emphasizing the assumptions that go into it about how spacetime emerges.  I will then discuss recent work with A. Almheiri and X. Dong, in which we proposed a new framework for understanding the emergence of bulk physics in AdS/CFT that is based on the theory of quantum error correcting codes.