Researcher Verlinde of Princeton University gives talk ‘This Week’s Discoveries’, Tuesday 1 June
The title of the lecture is “On the Emergence of Space and Gravity,” it is a public lecture, given in English and lasts 30 minutes, especially for this occasion, instead of the usual 15 minutes for This Week’s Discoveries lectures.
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Herman Verlinde is researcher in physics at Princeton University. He specialises in the string theory, both in terms of mathematical structure, the application of theory, the science aspects of black holes and cosmology.
Recently Verlinde deepens mainly in string phenomenology, the search for a theoretical description of string theory and a standard model of particle physics.
- Abstract
According to the `holographic principle’ of ‘t Hooft and Susskind, the world is a hologram: to describe everything inside a patch of space, one only needs an area worth of information, smeared over the boundary of the patch. The idea comes from black hole physics: information that falls into a black hole must somehow be stored in terms of a microscopic code written on the horizon. The holographic principle is realized in string theory, where the hologram has been deciphered in terms of a 2D system of multi-colored quarks and gluons. The hologram itself does not contain gravity: the third space dimension and the gravitational force are both ‘emergent’. In this short talk, I will highlight some illustrative aspects of this fascinating development.
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Image Left: The black hole that tells how quantum particles collectively behave in peculiar forms of quantum matter such as quark-gluon plasma found in cars and high-Tc superconductors (Nature 448: 1000, copyright Nature).
Image right: The holographic “AdS / CFT” correspondence that relates a gravity world in a higher dimension to quantum critical worlds created by for instance electrons that situate in a lower dimensional world, consisting on the ‘outside’ of the first (Science 322: 1639, copyright Science).
- Practical information
Date: 1 June 2010
Time: 13:00 – 13:40
Location: Sitterzaal, Oortgebouw; Niels Bohrweg 2, 2333 CA Leiden
Entrance fee: No fee
Language of instruction: English
