7:30 pm, Wednesday, November 9th, 2016
Fairmont Lounge, St. John's College
2111 Lower Mall, UBC

Gravity and Entanglement

Mark van Raamsdonk

Quantum mechanics is a basic set of rules for how our universe works at a fundamental level. It is essential to our understanding of matter, from elementary particles to the macroscopic world. One of the greatest challenges in physics is to understand how gravity, shown by Einstein to come from the dynamics of spacetime, fits in to this quantum picture. This is crucial to properly understand black holes, the expansion of our universe, and how the universe began.

In the 1970's, Stephen Hawking argued that gravity and black holes may actually be inconsistent with quantum mechanics. In this talk, I will suggest that not only are gravity and quantum mechanics mutually consistent, but that spacetime may be a fundamentally quantum mechanical entity that would not even exist without the inherently quantum mechanical phenomenon known as entanglement.

To learn more please visit his webpage.

Additional resources for this talk: slides, video.