Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU
Professor Raphael Bousso, UC Berkeley
Joy Blanchard at tpadmin@physics.ox.ac.uk
Gravity as a Quantum Computer
Our search for a quantum theory of gravity is aided by a unique and perplexing feature of the classical theory: General Relativity already knows about its own quantum states (the entropy of a black hole), and about those of all matter (via the covariant entropy bound). The results we are able to extract from classical gravity are inherently non-perturbative and increasingly sophisticated. Recent breakthroughs include a derivation of the entropy of Hawking radiation, a computation of the exact integer number of states of some black holes, and the construction of gravitational holograms in our universe using techniques from single-shot quantum communication protocols.