Black hole physics with an added quantum of uncertainty

(credit: NASA)

Every year, the Dutch physics community gets together to celebrate the year in physics. These are some highlights from the meeting. Since it is a meeting, it is not possible to link to published work (a talk could cover multiple papers or just parts of papers). Where possible, we've linked to the research group that presented the work.

It seems that this is the year that black hole physics is making a splash—in addition to dark matter, black hole talks seemed to be everywhere at the FOM conference. Appropriately enough, I was sucked right in to these talks. It seems that since Erik Verlinde confused us all five years ago, a lot of progress has been made. In particular, it feels as if the presenters are far more confident about what they can do with the tricks they've been developing.

One sign of the progress is that the session titled "The quantum information nature of spacetime" gave me a feeling other than overwhelming confusion. The entire session was focused on the quantum nature of black holes and how the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics was highlighted by black holes. This is not because of the singularity at the center of the black hole but because of what happens at the event horizon.

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from Scientific Method – Ars Technica http://ift.tt/208topt
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