Entanglement as the Glue of Spacetime

Abstract: The recent years have seen a remarkable convergence of quantum information theory and candidate quantum theories of gravity. The two fields used to be considered disjoint: gravity is weak to nonexistent in EPR-type experiments, and quantum effects were supposed to modify general relativity only at the Planck scale. But each side have been moving in the other’s direction. Within quantum information theory, the interpretational difficulties of Bell-inequality violations have led many to propose that classical spacetime is not a fundamental structure. For their part, workers in quantum gravity have found entanglement to be an essential ingredient of emergent-spacetime scenarios. In this talk I will give a conceptual introduction to some of the latter proposals, including the holographic principle, entanglement renormalization, noncommutative geometry, and thermodynamic derivations of general relativity. Disclaimer: I am an expert in none of these areas and my goal is simply to whet your appetite.


About the speaker: George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT for 2014–15, and the author of Spooky Action at a Distance (2015) and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory (2008). He was a writer-in-residence at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in 2011. He has won numerous awards for his writing, including the 2011 Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics and 2010 Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award from the American Astronomical Society. As Scientific American’s senior editor for space science and fundamental physics for 14 years, he was co-awarded the National Magazine Award in 2003 and 2011. Musser did his undergraduate studies in electrical engineering and mathematics at Brown University and his graduate work in planetary science at Cornell University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.